The first devices powered by the Apple M1 include the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13 and Mac mini. Now the Cupertino giant is betting its entire future on Arm-based chips developed fully in-house, leaving Intel behind and becoming more technologically self-sufficient. M1 marks a big architectural transition for the Mac since 2006, when Apple scrapped PowerPC in favor of Intel processors. And now Apple has effectively entered the mainstream CPU market, to rival the likes of Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. It’s simply the kind of thing that doesn’t happen every day, or every year. For us, this is akin to Intel joining the GPU wars in 2021. In this article, we’d like to share a few of our thoughts on why Apple M1 is a very relevant development in the world of computer hardware. Some will dismiss M1 efforts as being only for Apple devices (true), while others may see “magic” happening when Apple has been able to deliver a fast laptop that gets iPad-like battery life on their first attempt (also true). Needless to say, it’s not a straight line you can draw when Intel and AMD run x86 applications, and M1 runs native Arm code and can also translate x86. Ever since Apple launched its M1 processor and showed it running fast and cool on new MacBooks, the tech community has been abuzz testing the SoC and trying to draw comparisons to see where the M1 stands in terms of performance and efficiency against Intel or AMD counterparts.
