Apple announced that they are moving away from Intel to their own Apple silicon in WWDC 2020 (mid-2020) with great fan fare.
Now, it’s end-2020, Apple has released it’s 3 entry-level macs with their first M1 chips. They are the base Mac Mini, Macbook Air, and the base Macbook Pro 13″. Reviewers is astounded by how it performs especially on the Macbook Air where it’d handily beat out a full desktop iMac despite that Macbook Air doesn’t have a fan.
Apple has been working for ARM / RISC based processor longer than you think. Before Apple moved to Intel for the Mac, they were using IBM PowerPC series, which is a RISC chip. When they made the first iPhone, they were using Samsung ARM chips. They started making their own with the A4 chip (which were design from ARM) and use their own design starting from A6. So putting an ARM chip on a MacBook is not a decision that has been made 2–3 years ago, but over a decade ago when they started to put their own chips on their own phones.
Developers will have to recompile their programs to run M-series chip, which Apple says as easy as clicking a checkbox in the properties windows. But in real life, it’s not that simple. You have to check if you’re highly optimized for Intel code can compile and run on M1. And you have to optimized that code for M-series chip. But the good news is that big name houses like Microsoft and Adobe is going to release their flagship products sometimes by mid-2020.
It’s not an ARM-based processor, but it’s a M-series processor. This distinctive feature of the M-series is, yes it’s can run the ARM instruction sets but Apple added more instructions sets of their own. So programs build on ARM can run on Apple’s M1, but it might not taking advantage of special features on the M1 like GPUs, Neural Engine, image / video encoding and secure enclave. The M-series chips differs from any other ARM chips because Apple decide to put hardware accelerators on workloads which they think people will most likely to use, such as video encoding and neural processing.
Apple is now completely vertically integrated in building the Mac. Apple wall-garden approach on the iPhone and iPad platform has done wonders for not only for the user experience but also for Apple’s bottom line. W/ the M-series chip, Apple build a higher wall on the garden of macOS. The good news is that the ecosystem will be tighter and more functional, the bad news is, it will be more difficult to get out of that ecosystem. If this wall-garden approach is something people will like or not, it remains to be seen.
ARM is designed to be low-power, highly efficient from the ground up. But Apple take a few notches up. Apple didn’t just take an ARM design and run away with it. It take their instruction set, build it from scratch and science the sh*t out of it. The ARM is known for it’s low power design (the first testing the ARM, the inventor didn’t know that it didn’t power the chip it was testing), but Apple take it to the next level by making it powerful. It will be more interesting when they release M-series for the iMac and eventually for the Mac Pro.
Conclusion
Apple has decided that ARM is the future. It would not be any ARM, but a design of their own based on the ARM instruction set. There is many advantages to this approach as most reviewers has demonstrated but being locked in their walled garden might deter some potential clients out. All in all, it will be a great shake-up to the personal computing scene.
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