The 10th of November 2020 is the day the tech world changed. It seems that Apple's move to its own custom silicon isn't really a big thing. After all, it's only going to affect Mac desktop and laptop computers. However, the change is going to have huge repercussions throughout the entire industry. Here's why.
When the Mac first came on the scene it was running on a Motorola 68000 series processor. It was a great chip and also powered the Commodore Amiga, my most beloved computer platform of all time. However, it couldn't scale up and was getting long in the tooth at the time. IBM and Motorola had partnered together anyway on a new processor which we know of today as the PowerPC or PPC processor. As a RISC processor, it was a greatly more powerful processor than Intel/AMD's CISC based processors. However, in both cases, the 68000 and the PPC processors had one great problem making it harder for them to gain ground. The Megahertz Myth.
This myth was created by people who have no clue about technology and who only look at numbers to say whether or not something is better. It's this same pathetic mindedness that introduced the world to the Megapixel Myth concerning camera tech. Basically the processors I've mentioned, at the time, were made to sound like bad processors because the Intels were faster. It's very reminiscent of the "11" scene in "This is Spinal Tap"
The way the 68000 and PPC processors worked they could do more at seemingly slower speeds. This was because they didn't have to do as much work.
To explain the Megahertz Myth you need to watch this video:
This explains why Intel processors are so bad. However, that was back in 2001 and things have changed a bit, but not as much as you'd think.
This Megahertz Myth largely fell by the wayside when Apple moved to the Intel Core series of processors. Even though it was still an inefficient design, lack of progress with PPC meant Apple had nowhere to go but go with Intel.
Many people complain about Apple not using the latest processors from Intel in their machines. In fact, Apple took almost 5 years to upgrade the Mac Mini and in that time several processors had come out from Intel that Apple could have put into new Mac Minis each year. But the people who suggest this don't understand Apple and don't understand that the speed bumps were so minor. Apple doesn't upgrade desktops and laptops annually because the speed bumps are so pathetically minor.
When people started making a massive song and dance about how Apple was falling behind because they weren't refreshing their machines I told people that they aren't seeing the big picture. While the hardware had stagnated the OS hadn't and Apple was making the OS work better and better on the same systems. No mean feat. Of course, the reply was they could do both but these people were missing the point. Apple saw that the speed bumps weren't going to be of benefit. They also realised the same thing that I had realised... Apple had literally met the end of desktop and laptop technology. There was nowhere to go for them other than miserly speed bumps. The architecture was basically the same and hadn't really developed since 2007 when the Core2Duo was released. The only way Apple could do major work each year would be if they went the same route as they have done with the iPhone and iPad... develop their own processors.
And so here we are in 2020, at the end of a pathetic year looking at the release of the biggest technological jump in processors since 2007. And how was it achieved? EXACTLY how I thought it must... Apple developed its own processors. To be honest, calling Apple's silicon a processor is a little misleading. Apple Silicon is actually what's called a SOC, or System on a Chip. Effectively it's an entire CPU, RAM, and GPU in one chip rather than in multiple chips. This makes it more efficient. The CPU aspect of the SOC is made up of 8 cores. 4 of these cores are high-performance processors. This means they take more electricity but perform much higher than the 4 high-efficiency cores which take less electricity and perform lower.
This design is pretty cool actually. For most tasks, like watching movies or reading/writing emails, you don't need a lot of processing ability. Watching movies is largely processed by another processor anyway so the CPU doesn't need to do a lot of work. But video editing does require lots of processing power, especially when you're working with four 4k streams at the same time. Tasks like rendering 3D images, AR, or even just editing pictures in Photoshop all require high-performance processing. But Apple has a trick up its sleeve for stuff like this. Anything using the CoreML APIs will use clock cycles from the GPU as CPU cycles. So anything that requires large processing requirements will use all 8 cores, including the low-performance cores, and the GPU. This gives the machine over 16 trillion calculations per second which make the processing capabilities of Apple Silicon astonishing in such a small chip.
And that's not even factoring in the shared nature of the RAM. In theory, you won't need more than 8 or 16GB RAM because you're not replicating the same data for each task needed.
Which leads me back to the Amiga. Apple has effectively developed the modern Amiga because it's very much doing what that computer was doing back in the 80s and 90s. That's also factoring in that much like the Amiga, much of the OS is stored in a ROM chip (although it can be updated on the Mac so it's more EEPROM). This makes macOS (even more so iOS) run so much quicker on these systems.
Intel is going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to beat Apple Silicon. It failed to provide Apple what it needed with the Atom and now it's failed to give Apple what it needed with the current CPUs. Intel will be slow to catch up and given the decline of the PC market it seems like it may never. So it's going to have to change focus and just make the best Windows chips it can. It will never be able to compete with Apple now but it might be the kick it needs to start changing the way they design chips. This will have a flow-on effect for all desktop and laptop computers. It's going to be an interesting watch over the next 5 years. But remember, Apple Silicon that has just been released is a 1.0 product. Apple can only go up. All eyes now must be on Intel and AMD to see how they progress