AnandTech, a famous blog reporting analysis on computer hardware, has just made a detailed analysis of Apple’s latest M1 chip. This is Apple’s first-ever silicon chip embedded into its new MacBook lineup launched this week and named Apple’s highest-performing chip ever. It’s benchmarked using an A14 chip to check on other high-end rival chips.
Apple’s New M1 Chip is the Fastest Ever
As we earlier discussed Apple’s shift from Intel to its own in-house chip, the company has finally done it. It was codenamed Project Kalamata and now officially named Apple M1. This is being set into MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, which were launched on Tuesday this week.
Soon after their launch, AnandTech has released a five-page report detailing the new chip’s performance. They started with M1’s design, which was packed with keeping the embedded memory aside, thus hinting at the usage of a 128-bit DRAM bus like that of previous A-X chips.
Looking internally, Apple said the new M1 chip has eight cores, with four high performing cores as “Firestorm” and four as efficiency cores named “Icestorm.” And from the chip’s unveiling at the Apple event, AnandTech said it could be having 12MB of cache, which is 50% greater than its flagship A14 chip of 8GB L2 cache. This is justified as it has two more high performing cores than A14’s two.
The report goes further to compare the chip with current flagships of its rivals – AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X and Intel’s i7-1185G7. Since they can’t have their hands on M1 already, they considered A14 for benchmarking and performed single-thread tests against others. And they revealed to have surprising results.
The graph above shows that Intel had made a mere performance increase of 28% over five years span, whereas Apple’s A14 chip has near 198% increment in performance.
And this could be the major factor that motivated Apple to make its own chip and give Intel reason for ditching them. While we hoped that the entire Apple lineup might take at least two years for transition, it could happen soon.
