Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.

The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.

Series	Apple Apple M-Series
Series: Apple M-Series Apple M2 Max 2.42 - 3.7 GHz 12 / 12  48 MB L3 Apple M2 Pro 2.42 - 3.5 GHz 12 / 12  24 MB L3 Apple M1 Max 2.06 - 3.22 GHz 10 / 10  48 MB L3 Apple M2 Pro 10-Core 2.42 - 3.7 GHz 10 / 10  24 MB L3 Apple M1 Pro 2.06 - 3.22 GHz 10 / 10  24 MB L3 Apple M1 Pro 8-Core 2.06 - 3.22 GHz 8 / 8  16 MB L3 Apple M2 2.42 - 3.48 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3 Apple M1 « 2.06 - 3.22 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3
Clock Rate	2064 - 3220 MHz
Level 1 Cache	2 MB
Level 2 Cache	16 MB
Level 3 Cache	8 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	8 / 8
Transistor Count	16000 Million
Manufacturing Technology	5 nm
Features	ARMv8 Instruction Set
GPU	Apple M1 8-Core GPU
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	ARM
Announcement Date	11/10/2020

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