Apple M1 Silicon
Can Systems On Chips be faster?
This year Apple made a huge move in the development space and decided to get rid of its dependence on Intel and has moved its custom ARM chip development that it has been using in all the iPhone and iPad’s for a decade to the laptop and eventually to the desktop space. This is a very good thing © and since I had some free apple cash laying around, I decided to upgrade my powerbook setup to include the new silicon to see if I can take advantage of some of the increased efficiency and speed on these new machines.
Comparison to Previous Intel PowerBook
My previous PowerBook was a maxed out 2019, 2.8GHz Quad-Core i7 with 16GB or Ram. This one has the same amount of RAM but has the Unified Memory Architecture and both CPU and GPU system on a chip. Here are the consequences of that in terms of single and multiple processor operations.
I downloaded the latest version of GeekBench 5 and ran the same basic tests on both machines. Neither was plugged in
Intel Quad-Core i7
Apple ARM M1
First Impressions
This thing is quite snappy and for the software that has been recompiled for the native archtiecture, it is quite impressive considering it will be the slowest ARM Silicon that Apple will release for laptops.
