Apple M1
Benchmarks & Specs

The Apple M1 is Apples first ARM chip for Macs. It is based on and is similar to Apples mobile A processors, but has four times more level 2 cache than the Apple A14 Bionic (16 MB to 4 MB in the Apple A14 Bionic). It combines 4 fast and large Firestorm cores with 4 efficient and smaller Icestorm cores. The core structure is built in the big.LITTLE design, which makes the chips very strong but also energy-saving at the same time.

Like the Apple A14 Bionic, the Apple M1 is also manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC, making it the first series chip for mobile and desktop devices to be manufactured in 5 nm. The finer the manufacturing structure, the more energy-efficient the processors can be. The processor is operated at 3.2 GHz and can be used passively (without active ventilation) or actively with a fan. The TDP is 10 to 15 watts.

The Apple M1 comes with a very fast iGPU with 7 or 8 GPU cores. The 8-core variant of the iGPU achieves an FP32 raw performance of 2.6 TFLOPGS (2600 GFLOPS). In addition, the SoC is equipped with 16 AI / ML cores for machine calculations such as video or image processing. There is also an ISP for optimizing images and recordings via the notebooks webcam. The chip supports hardware-accelerated AES and can thus encrypt the data on the SSD built into the system quickly and efficiently.

Up to 16 GB LPDDR4X / LPDDR5 main memory is supported, which in the Apple M1 is integrated in a dense DRAM package directly in the SoC, which greatly increases the bandwidth and the associated data throughput. The iGPU, which also uses the main memory as graphics memory, benefits to a large extent from this. That is enough for the processor to currently secure first place in the Geekbench 5 - single core benchmark. But even in multi-core benchmarks, the 15 watt processor achieves scores that were previously only reserved for 45+ watt processors.

• Remarkable energy efficiency
• Strong integrated graphics performance
• Smooth user experience
• Advanced 5 nm manufacturing