Apple M1
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Apple M1
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| Designer | Apple |
|---|---|
| Introduced | November 2020 (MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", Mac mini) |
| Process | 5 nm N5 (TSMC) — 16 billion transistors |
| CPU | 8-core: 4 Firestorm + 4 Icestorm · Pro: 8/10-core · Max: 10-core · Ultra: 20-core |
| GPU | 7/8-core · Pro: 14/16-core · Max: 24/32-core · Ultra: 48/64-core |
| Neural Engine | 16-core (11T ops/s) · Ultra: 32-core |
| Unified memory | Up to 16 GB (68 GB/s) · Pro: 32 GB (200 GB/s) · Max: 64 GB (400 GB/s) · Ultra: 128 GB (800 GB/s) |
| Devices | MacBook Air (2020) · MacBook Pro 13" (2020) · Mac mini (2020) · iMac 24" (2021) · MacBook Pro 14"/16" (2021) · Mac Studio (2022) · iPad Pro (2021) · iPad Air (2022) |
| Predecessor | Intel processors (Mac) — architecture scaled from Apple A14 |
| Successor | Apple M2 |
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The Apple M1, unveiled November 10, 2020, was the first Mac chip of the Apple silicon era — the A-series architecture scaled to a computer, launched in a MacBook Air with no fan that outran Intel MacBook Pros costing three times as much. Its performance-per-watt broke the industry's assumptions overnight, and Rosetta 2 translated x86 apps fast enough that the two-year Intel transition felt instant.
1 Variants✎
October 2021's M1 Pro and M1 Max brought the pro-chip ladder: more performance cores, ProRes media engines, and memory bandwidth of 200 and 400 GB/s in the redesigned MacBook Pro 14" and 16". March 2022's M1 Ultra fused two Max dies through UltraFusion — a 2.5 TB/s die-to-die interconnect presenting 20 CPU cores and up to a 64-core GPU as one chip — and launched the Mac Studio.
2 Legacy✎
The M1 ended fifteen years of Intel Macs and set the template every generation since has followed: base, Pro, Max, Ultra. It also crossed back into iPad — the 2021 iPad Pro and 2022 iPad Air ran the same silicon as the Mac — collapsing the hardware line between Apple's two computer platforms.