Why The Apple M1 Chip Is So Fast – A Developer Explains | Production Expert

Another benefit of a system-in-a-chip design is that everything so much closer together. At the speeds we are talking about, the distance data has to travel, even at the speed of light, can matter. It is going to be quicker to move data over millimetres or even microns within an SoC as opposed to centimetres around a motherboard.

Finally, the M1 does use virtual memory. VM is where the CPU uses hard disk space as RAM when it runs out of proper RAM. When we were using spinning rust drives that was so slow, hence the push to have as much RAM as you could afford. Now with NVMe drives you have hard drives that are pretty well as fast as RAM, so in an M1 system, although the virtual memory use is significant, it can be considered as fast as RAM in Intel machines.

Taken together, these benefits are what people like us are experiencing, as Erik says…

“This is part of the reason why a lot of people working on images and video editing with the ‌M1‌ Macs are seeing such speed improvements. A lot of the tasks they do can run directly on specialized hardware. That is what allows a cheap ‌M1‌ Mac Mini to encode a large video file, without breaking a sweat while an expensive iMac has all its fans going full blast and still cannot keep up.”

Now to be fair, specialised chips are nothing new but as Erik says, Apple is taking this concept and then taking a “more radical shift towards this direction.”

Apple has been able to take their 10 years of experience developing phones and tablets that have become ever faster and more powerful, whilst becoming more power-efficient, which is crucial in portable devices where battery life is so important and where heat means power inefficiency.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, has spoken about how Steve Jobs used to push Apple to “make the whole widget.”

“Steve used to say that we make the whole widget,” Joswiak told me. “We’ve been making the whole widget for all of our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac.”

Developer Erik Engheim picks up on this point…

“Sure Intel and AMD may simply begin to sell whole finished SoCs. But what are these to contain? PC makers may have different ideas of what they should contain. You potentially get a conflict between Intel, AMD, Microsoft and PC makers about what sort of specialized chips should be included because these will need software support.”

The reality is that there are benefits that Intel and AMD will never be able to offer, even if they are dragged screaming and kicking into the SoC world, whereas Apple is able to offer the full deal because they control both the hardware and software.

“They give you, for example, the Core ML library for developers to write machine learning stuff. Whether Core ML runs on Apple’s CPU or the Neural Engine is an implementation detail developers don’t have to care about.”

Johny Srouj, senior vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, said in an interview with Om Malik that bringing the Mac processors in-house gives Apple far more control over the future:

“I believe the Apple model is unique and the best model,” he said. “We’re developing a custom silicon that is perfectly fit for the product and how the software will use it. When we design our chips, which are like three or four years ahead of time, Craig and I are sitting in the same room defining what we want to deliver, and then we work hand in hand. You cannot do this as an Intel or AMD or anyone else.”

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, echoed those thoughts:

“Being in a position for us to define together the right chip to build the computer we want to build and then build that exact chip at scale is a profound thing,” Federighi said about the symbiotic relationship between hardware and software groups at Apple. Both teams strive to look three years into the future and see what the systems of tomorrow look like. Then they build software and hardware for that future.

Coming back to the processors, another reason why the M1 is so fast is that Apple is using a processor design that is able to execute more instructions in parallel through what is called ‘Out-of-Order execution’, RISC architecture, and some specific tweaks Apple has used, which Erik provides an in-depth explanation of in his article. If you want to learn more then we do recommend you check out his article.