Apple's Arm-based M1 Processor is here!

Back in June, Apple announced that they were transitioning the Mac away from Intel and onto their own Arm-Based Processor, and during that event they promised that they would be announcing and releasing the first line-up of Macs with this feature before the end of the year.

Today, Apple held their One More Thing event where they showed off their new processor, and the line up of Macs that will be available next week with the processor in.

Their new processor is a 5nm chip called M1. Its build with an 8-core processor, which Apple are saying is the fastest CPU cores of any processor ever made, and the best performance per watt of any CPU in its class. The M1 also has integrated an 8-core graphics processing unit its which Apple are again saying is able to out perform the “latest PC laptop chip” while requiring less power.

They have also annouced the first product ranges that will include the M1 Chip, these are the Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and Mac Mini.

The Macbook Air is promising up to a 3.5x faster CPU, 5x Faster Graphics, 2x faster CPU and upto 18 hours of battery life.

Remarkably, these devices ship in the next few days and possibly even more remarkable is there hasn't been any leaks on the media about them. I am excited to see what the uptake of these devices are, and how they compare to their Intel counterparts.

More intresting to me, is how quickly Apple remove Intel from its product offering, there is going to be a wide range of Business, Schools, Colleges and Universities that will have invested huge amounts of money into Apple Equipment and Software that is designed to run on Intel based Macs, and if that sofware is not able to be installed or run on the new M1 based Macs then they are going to have to upgrade and expense more money to upgrade all their equipment.

Either way, this is a huge move forward for the industy, Apple have included Gen 4 PCI Express on the M1 which means that its the second chip manufacture, after AMD's Ryzen to support it, with Intels Rocket Lake supposedly including Gen 4 PCI Express support but not launching until sometime in 2021.

It is always exciting when something new comes to the market to challenge the leaders, and given AMD's annoucement recently it should add some additional presure to Intel to push the limits of what they can create and release a CPU that is more Quicker, Cooler, and uses less battery power than anything else on the market.

Apple will always have an advantage when they control all the technology invoved, the entire computer architecture and the operating system that is used on it, they will be able to harmoniously marry the two together to provide a steamless, easy to use and fast and efficent product that has a better battery life than ever before.