Apple Intros First Three ‘Apple Silicon’ Macs: Late 2020 Mac…

As beforehand introduced by Apple this summer time, the corporate is embarking on a significant transition inside its Mac product lineup. After virtually a decade and a half of counting on Intel’s x86 processors to serve on the coronary heart of each Mac, the corporate goes to be shifting to relying by itself, in-house designed Arm processors to energy their now un-PC computer systems. At the time Apple set the beginning of the transition on the finish of this 12 months, and proper on cue, at this time Apple introduced the primary three Apple Silicon-powered Macs: the Late 2020 editions of the MacGuide Air, the 13-Inch MacGuide Pro, and the Mac Mini.

Three of the lower-end gadgets throughout the Mac household, Apple is beginning small for his or her Arm transition. The Mac Mini is in fact the smallest and most built-in of Apple’s desktop-style computer systems. Meanwhile the MacGuide Air and MacGuide Pro are Apple’s two 13.3-inch laptops, targeted on portability and efficiency respectively. Fittingly, these are additionally the areas the place performance-per-watt is usually probably the most crucial, as Apple could be very strongly power-constrained on these platforms, and thus performance-limited as effectively.

Before diving into the person Macs, it’s fascinating to notice simply how little is altering on the skin. The new machines are all clearly reusing the designs of their x86-based predecessors, if not components of the shell in some instances. And in contrast to the transition to x86 that began in 2006, Apple isn’t even cleansing the slate with product naming – the Arm-based Macs all proceed the MacGuide/Mac Mini naming quite than being the progenitors of recent households of machines. Apple needs to make the transition to Arm Macs as seamless as attainable, and this goes proper on right down to their design and product names. So though guts will likely be totally totally different, these new merchandise are nonetheless designed to be Macs in each considerable means.

Powering all three of those new machines will likely be Apple’s first Mac-focused Apple Silicon chip, the Apple M1. Our personal Andrei Frumusanu has an in depth breakdown on the brand new M1 chips and what we count on from them based mostly on Apple’s A14 SoC used within the recently-launched iPhone 12 household. But in brief, M1 seems rather a lot like a beefier A14, with 4 of Apple’s high-performance Firestorm cores – 2 greater than on A14 – joined by 4 high-efficiency Icestorm cores. Meanwhile the GPU design has been bulked as much as Eight cores there as effectively, doubling A14. Finally, becoming a member of this are numerous different useful blocks for the SoC, together with a flash storage controller, a safe enclave, Apple’s neural engine (NPU), and a Thunderbolt 3 + USB four controller. All of this, in flip, is made on a 5nm course of – no double the identical TSMC 5nm course of that Apple used for the A14.

MacGuide Air (Late 2020)

Starting issues off, we have now the MacGuide Air. The most not too long ago (re)launched member of Apple’s Mac lineup, the Air is the corporate’s smallest and most cost-effective laptop computer. The closing Intel revision of the laptop computer was launched in March, the place it shipped with Intel’s Ice Lake-Y processors, topping out with the quad CPU core i7-1060NG7. The latest mannequin picks up the place the earlier one left off, swapping out Intel’s silicon for Apple’s personal M1 processor.