Apple’s A4 was the first chip designed by Apple itself. However, that chip was used by Apple in iPad 1st Generation, iPhone 4, iPod touch 4th Generation, and Apple TV 2nd Generation. While talking about Mac, Apple was dependent on Motorola, IBM, and, more recently, Intel’s chips.
But during an investor call meeting in 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple is now going to own and control all the primary technologies that Apple uses to make its different products.
That statement, made by Apple CEO Tim Cook, was better understood when Apple announced its M1 chip in November last year. With the announcement of the M1 chip, Apple said goodbye to its 15-year processor partnership with Intel.
The M1 is the first chip Apple has made to use on its Mac devices and is currently being used on the MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro.
So what is it that made Apple break its 15-year partnership with Intel and started making its chip?
In a report published by The Wire, Apple Silicon’s in-charge Johny Srouji had said that Apple would be able to connect its products even better with the creation of its technology.
Apart from this, the company believes that it can produce better in chip manufacturing than the current business model of Intel and Qualcomm.
5nm is the leading processor technology for PC
As of now, the 5-nanometer architecture is the leading-edge processor technology for computers. However, currently, only a few companies are producing it. On the one hand, Apple’s M1 chip is being produced by Apple’s chip manufacturing partner TSMC. At the same time, Intel is still stuck in the production of 10-nanometer processors, and somewhere, in this case, the x86 architecture of Intel processors is responsible for it.
Apple’s M1 may Invent New Technologies for PC
Apple has already mastered designing its A-Series processors, which it uses in iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc. On the other hand, talking about the M1 processor, an ARM architecture-based processor, Apple’s first designed processor is being used in Mac devices.
Experts believe that there will not be much difference between computers and smartphones in the coming years. Right now, users are more inclined towards smartphones; however, in coming years, due to processors like the M1 chip, people will start leaning more towards computers too.
Due to Apple’s processors for the iPhones, features like facial recognition and augmented reality were possible. Similarly, Apple will develop many other unique features in the coming days due to making processors like M1 for Mac.
When the chip, software, and device manufacturers work together, they will produce better products. That’s the reason why we saw many features being upgraded as the M1 chip came to the Mac, such as 3.9x faster video processing, 7.1x speedier image processing, 3.5x faster CPU performance, 2x faster graphics performance, improved battery life, and so on.
Apple’s M1 Neural Engine to run Machine Learning code better
In chips designed and manufactured by other companies, sometimes a company may have to depend on that other company’s business model to stop developing new features. For example, in Apple-designed M1 chips, we get a dedicated neural engine that knows machine learning code better. For instance, with the help of the neural engine in the M1 chip, some video editing software, games, etc., which uses machine learning code, will run much better.
So this is the reason why Apple has inspired itself to design its processors. It remains to be seen whether in the coming day’s Apple will be able to beat its competitors through its new processor manufacturer TSMC and at the same time will be able to move the world towards a new computing era.
