But we've been working for years to build a consistent set of APIs across all our platforms and to optimize those frameworks for Apple Silicon. So, how should your applications take advantage of these new capabilities from macOS? You might be expecting us to announce new APIs for you to adopt in your applications.
macOS will use all these cores simultaneously, and applications are scheduled onto the appropriate cores depending on their current performance requirements. The cores support the same architectural features and command all the same software. We call this asymmetric multiprocessing, or AMP. The Mac has had a multi-core CPU for years, but for Intel-based Macs, all cores have similar performance.Īpple Silicon Macs have a mix of performance cores for when your application needs the maximum performance, and more power-efficient cores for less CPU-intensive tasks. Apple Silicon contains coprocessors, including powerful and efficient video encoders and decoders, the Neural Engine and matrix multiplication machine learning accelerators. Using Apple Silicon in the Mac also allows us to bring unique technologies developed for the iPhone and iPad over to the Apple Mac. Graphics resources, such as textures, images and geometry data, can be shared between the CPU and GPU efficiently, with no overhead, as there's no need to copy data across a PCIe bus. This means that the GPU and CPU are working over the same memory. Building everything into one chip gives the system a unified memory architecture. Now, the new Apple Silicon Macs combine all these components into a single system on a chip, or SoC. Machines with a discrete GPU have separate memory for the CPU and GPU. Intel-based Macs contain a multi-core CPU, and many have a discrete GPU, and recent Macs also have a T2 chip which enables features such as Apple Pay, TouchID and Hey Siri. Then I'll hand over to my colleague, Anand, who'll be taking you through boot features and recovery. We'll go over some security enhancements, and we'll touch on application compatibility.
We're going to talk about new features and how to take advantage of them in your macOS applications.
So I'm delighted to get to introduce some of the changes coming in these systems. I'm in the Core OS group, and my team have been working on bringing macOS to Apple Silicon. The CPU cores will be swapped out for a 2-efficiency, 8-performance setup, and GPU cores will be quadrupled from the base M1 chip (for a total of 40).Ĭross notes that he’s excluding any performance gain from TSMC’s expected 4nm process, as that can be used to boost power, extend battery life, or any balance of the two.Hi.
In trying to predict the M2’s features and performance, we will operate on the assumption that it will follow a similar pattern, only this time with the A15: the same architecture with twice the high-performance cores and GPU cores For the M2 Max, we assume the same scaling-up as from the M1 to M1 Max. It is, for lack of a better explanation, the “A14X” that otherwise would’ve been in the iPad Pro. The M1 is based on the basic architecture of the A14, scaled up with double the number of high-performance CPU cores (four instead of two) and double the GPU cores (eight instead of four). Not from the M1 to the M1 Pro/Max chips, but rather, suggests Macworld’s Jason Cross, by looking at the generational leap from the A14 to A15. We’ll need to see whether that happens and wait for M2 Mac benchmarks if it does.īut a new piece today suggests that we may be able to get a reasonably good idea of M2 Mac benchmarks by extrapolating…
There have been a number of reports of an M2 Mac this year, including the slightly odd idea of an entry-level M2 MacBook Pro model sitting below the M1 Pro and M1 Max models.