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Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 - What to Expect, Based on A14

The new processor is called the Apple M1, the company's first SoC designed with Macs in mind. With four large performance cores, four efficiency cores, and an 8-GPU core GPU, it features 16 billion transistors on a 5nm process node. Apple's is starting a new SoC naming scheme for this new family of processors, but at least on paper it looks a lot like an A14X.

[...] Apple made mention that the M1 is a true SoC, including the functionality of what previously was several discrete chips inside of Mac laptops, such as I/O controllers and Apple's SSD and security controllers.

[....] Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let's call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.

[...] Apple has claimed that they will completely transition their whole consumer line-up to Apple Silicon within two years, which is an indicator that we'll be seeing a high-TDP many-core design to power a future Mac Pro. If the company is able to continue on their current performance trajectory, it will look extremely impressive.

[....] Apple's usage of a significantly more advanced microarchitecture that offers significant IPC, enabling high performance at low core clocks, allows for significant power efficiency gains versus the incumbent x86 players. The graphic shows that at peak-to-peak, M1 offers around a 40% performance uplift compared to the existing competitive offering, all whilst doing it at 40% of the power consumption.

Apple's comparison of random performance points is to be criticised, however the 10W measurement point where Apple claims 2.5x the performance does make some sense, as this is the nominal TDP of the chips used in the Intel-based MacBook Air. Again, it's thanks to the power efficiency characteristics that Apple has been able to achieve in the mobile space that the M1 is promised to showcase such large gains – it certainly matches our A14 data.

[...] Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel's designs, and just falling short of AMD's newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.

See also: Apple is astonishingly confident in its new M1 Mac processors
The New M1 Mac mini Comes Apple's 8-Core & GPU, Delivers 3x More CPU Performance, and Only Costs $699
Apple's New M1 MacBook Air, Pro and Mini Can't be Configured with More than 16GB of RAM
The M1 MacBook Air Actually Has Two Chipset Variants to Buy, One With Smaller Number of GPU Cores
TSMC cannot meet the entire Apple M1 order volume, Samsung could jump to the rescue
macOS 11.0 Big Sur: The Ars Technica review
Parallels working on support for Apple's M1 Arm-based silicon, could bring Windows 10 back to the Mac
Apple Silicon Macs Can Run Any iOS App, but Major Developers Have Reportedly Decided Not to Offer Them for Now

Previously: Apple Will Reportedly Sell a New Mac Laptop With its Own Chips Next Year
Apple Announces 2-Year Transition to ARM SoCs in Mac Desktops and Laptops
Apple's New ARM-Based Macs Won't Support Windows Through Boot Camp
Embarrassingly Apple's Two-Year Old ARM Chip Benchmarks Faster Than Microsoft's Surface Pro X
Apple Has Built its Own Mac Graphics Processors

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