Apple M1

The Apple M1 is the first ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. as a central processing unit (CPU) for its line of Macintosh computers. It is deployed in the MacBook Air (M1, 2020), Mac mini (M1, 2020), and the MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020). It is the first personal computer chip built using a 5 nm process. Apple claims that it has the world's fastest CPU core "in low power silicon" and the world's best CPU performance per watt.

Architecture
The M1 has four high-performance Firestorm and four energy-efficient Icestorm cores, providing a configuration similar to ARM DynamIQ and Intel's hybrid Lakefield and Alder Lake processors. This combination allows power-use optimizations not possible with Apple–Intel architecture devices. Apple claims the energy-efficient cores use one tenth the power of the high-performance ones. The high-performance cores have 192 KB of L1 instruction cache and 128 KB of L1 data cache and share a 12 MB L2 cache; the energy-efficient cores have a 128 KB L1 instruction cache, 64 KB L1 data cache, and a shared 4 MB L2 cache. The Icestorm "E cluster" has a frequency of 0.6–2.064 GHz and a maximum power consumption of 1.3 W. The Firestorm "P cluster" has a frequency of 0.6–3.204 GHz and a maximum power consumption of 13.8 W.

Rosetta 2 dynamic binary translation technology enables M1-equipped products to run software built for Intel x86 CPUs.

The M1 uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM in a unified memory configuration shared by all the components of the processor. The SoC and RAM chips are mounted together in a system-in-a-package design. 8 GB and 16 GB configurations are available.

The M1 integrates an Apple-designed eight-core (seven in some models) graphics processing unit (GPU) which by Apple's claim could execute nearly 25,000 threads simultaneously and dedicated neural network hardware in a 16-core Neural Engine, capable of executing 11 trillion operations per second. Other components include an image signal processor (ISP), an NVMe storage controller, Thunderbolt 4 controllers, and a Secure Enclave.

Performance and efficiency
The M1 was welcomed with very positive reviews and recorded industry-leading performance and efficiency in popular benchmarks (GeekBench 5, Cinebench R2). The benchmarking methodology for single thread synthetic benchmarks was criticized as being flawed when comparing to simultaneous multithreading enabled x86 CPUs.

The MacBook Air (M1, 2020) and MacBook Pro (M1, 2020) are considered to be the fastest MacBooks ever produced by Apple with the MacBook Pro (M1, 2020) leading the field in battery life.

Products that include the Apple M1

 * MacBook Air (fourth generation)
 * Mac Mini (fifth generation)
 * MacBook Pro (sixth generation)