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What Makes Apple Silicon So Fast?

Erik Engheim
Debugger
Published in
23 min readNov 28, 2020

Image: Apple

On YouTube, I watched a Mac user who had bought an iMac last year. It was maxed out with 40 GB of RAM costing him about $4,000. He watched in disbelief how his hyperexpensive iMac was being demolished by his new M1 Mac Mini, which he had paid a measly $700 for.

In real-world test after test, the M1 Macs are not merely inching past top-of-the-line Intel Macs, they are destroying them. In disbelief, people have started asking how on earth this is possible?

If you are one of those people, you have come to the right place. Here I plan to break it down into digestible pieces exactly what it is that Apple has done with the M1. Specifically the questions I think a lot of people have are:

  1. What are the technical reasons this M1 chip is so fast?
  2. Has Apple made some really exotic technical choices to make this possible?
  3. How easy will it be for the competition such as Intel and AMD to pull the same technical tricks?

Sure you could try to Google this, but if you try to learn what Apple has done beyond the superficial explanations, you will quickly get buried in highly…

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Debugger
Debugger

Published in Debugger

Debugger is a former publication from Medium about consumer technology and gadgets. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Erik Engheim
Erik Engheim

Written by Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.

Responses (112)

Your last paragraph is delusional clap trap. AMD has been developing APUs and was the premier driver of HSA long before Apple got into the game.
What's worse is you know nothing of Xilinx and how it is going to completely revolutionize AMDs designs…

192

PC users may jump ship, but that is a slow process. You don’t leave immediately a platform you are heavily invested in.

Once, Linux and Windows can run on M1 chip. AMD and Intel is doom.
based on current changing speed, Run Linux and Windows in M1 chip is just a matter of time.

158

Don't underestimate the value of the toolchain - xcode is optimized for Apple Silicon (and many years of iOS), and this is tightly coupled the underlying OS - good article, well done

163