 Image of an M1 processor inside the 2020Mac Mini. The two black chips on the right are the LPDDR4X unified memory. | |
| General information | |
|---|---|
| Launched | November 10, 2020 (2020-11-10)[1] |
| Discontinued | May 7, 2024; 10 months ago (2024-05-07) |
| Designed by | Apple Inc. |
| Common manufacturer | |
| Performance | |
| Max.CPUclock rate | 3.2 GHz[1] |
| Cache | |
| L1cache | Performance cores: 192+128 KB per core Efficiency cores: 128+64 KB per core |
| L2 cache | Performance Cores: 12–48 MB Efficiency Cores: 4–8 MB |
| Last level cache | 8–96 MB system level cache |
| Architecture and classification | |
| Application | Desktop (Mac Mini,iMac,Mac Studio), notebook (MacBook family), tablet (iPad Pro andiPad Air) |
| Technology node | 5 nm (N5) |
| Microarchitecture | "Firestorm" and "Icestorm"[1] |
| Instruction set | ARMv8.4-A[2] |
| Physical specifications | |
| Transistors |
|
| Cores |
|
| Memory (RAM) | |
| GPU | Apple-designed integrated graphics (7–64 cores) |
| Products, models, variants | |
| Variant | |
| History | |
| Predecessors | Intel Core andApple T2 chip (Mac) Apple A12Z (iPad Pro) Apple A14 (iPad Air) |
| Successor | Apple M2 |
| Mac transition to Apple silicon |
|---|
 |
Apple M1 is a series ofARM-basedsystem-on-a-chip (SoC) designed byApple Inc., launched 2020 to 2022. It is part of theApple silicon series, as acentral processing unit (CPU) andgraphics processing unit (GPU) for itsMacdesktops andnotebooks, and theiPad Pro andiPad Airtablets.[4] The M1 chip initiated Apple's third change to theinstruction set architecture used by Macintosh computers,switching from Intel to Apple silicon fourteen years after they wereswitched from PowerPC to Intel, and twenty-six years after the transition from the originalMotorola 68000 series toPowerPC. At the time of its introduction in 2020, Apple said that the M1 had "the world's fastest CPU core in low power silicon" and the world's best CPUperformance per watt.[4][5] Its successor,Apple M2, was announced on June 6, 2022, atWorldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
The original M1 chip was introduced in November 2020, and was followed by the professional-focusedM1 Pro andM1 Max chips in October 2021. The M1 Max is a higher-powered version of the M1 Pro, with moreGPU cores andmemory bandwidth, a largerdie size, and a large used interconnect. Apple introduced theM1 Ultra in 2022, a desktopworkstation chip containing two interconnected M1 Max units. These chips differ largely in size and the number of functional units: for example, while the original M1 has about 16 billiontransistors, the M1 Ultra has 114 billion.
Apple'smacOS andiPadOSoperating systems both run on the M1. Initial support for the M1 SoC in theLinux kernel was released in version 5.13 on June 27, 2021.[6]
The initial versions of the M1 chips contain an architectural defect that permits sandboxed applications to exchange data, violating the security model, an issue that has been described as "mostly harmless".[7]
The M1 has four high-performance "Firestorm" and four energy-efficient "Icestorm"cores, first seen on theA14 Bionic. It has ahybrid configuration similar toARM big.LITTLE and Intel'sLakefield processors.[8] This combination allows power-use optimizations not possible with previousApple–Intel architecture devices. Apple claims the energy-efficient cores use one-tenth the power of the high-performance ones.[9] The high-performance cores have an unusually large[10] 192 KB of L1instruction cache and 128 KB of L1 data cache and share a 12 MB L2 cache; the energy-efficient cores have a 128 KB L1 instruction cache, 64 KB L1 data cache, and a shared 4 MB L2 cache. The SoC also has an 8 MB System Level Cache shared by the GPU.
The M1 Pro and M1 Max use the sameARM big.LITTLE design as the M1, with eight high-performance "Firestorm" (six in thelower-binned variants of the M1 Pro) and two energy-efficient "Icestorm"cores, providing a total of ten cores (eight in the lower-binned variants of the M1 Pro).[11] The high-performance cores are clocked at 3228 MHz, and the high-efficiency cores are clocked at 2064 MHz. The eight high-performance cores are split into two clusters. Each high-performance cluster shares 12 MB of L2 cache. The two high-efficiency cores share 4 MB of L2 cache. The M1 Pro and M1 Max have 24 MB and 48 MB respectively of system level cache (SLC).[12]
The M1 Ultra consists of two M1 Max units connected with UltraFusion Interconnect with a total of 20 CPU cores and 96 MB system level cache (SLC).
The M1 integrates an Apple designed[13] eight-core (seven in some base models) graphics processing unit (GPU). Each GPU core is split into 16execution units (EUs), which each contain 8arithmetic logic units (ALUs). In total, the M1 GPU contains up to 128 EUs and 1024 ALUs,[14] which Apple says can execute up to 24,576 threads simultaneously and which have a maximum floating point (FP32) performance of 2.6TFLOPs.[8][15]
The M1 Pro integrates a 16-core (14 in some base models) graphics processing unit (GPU), while the M1 Max integrates a 32-core (24 in some base models) GPU. In total, the M1 Max GPU contains up to 512execution units or 4096 ALUs, which have a maximum floating point (FP32) performance of 10.4TFLOPs.
The M1 Ultra features a 48- or 64-core GPU with up to 8192 ALUs and 21 TFLOPs of FP32 performance.
| Model | RAM (-MT/s) | Width | Data rate | TB Controller |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M1 | LPDDR4X-4266 | 128 bit | 68.3 GB/s | 2×TB3 |
| M1 Pro | LPDDR5-6400 | 256 bit | 204.8 GB/s | 2×TB4 |
| M1 Max | 512 bit | 409.6 GB/s | 4×TB4 | |
| M1 Ultra | 1024 bit | 819.2 GB/s | 8×TB4 |
The M1 uses a 128-bitLPDDR4X SDRAM[16] in aunified memory configuration shared by all the components of the processor, aka memory on package (MOP). The SoC and DRAM chips are mounted together in asystem-in-a-package design. 8 GB and 16 GB configurations are available.
The M1 Pro has 256-bitLPDDR5 SDRAM, and the M1 Max has 512-bit LPDDR5 SDRAM memory. While the M1 SoC has 70 GB/s memory bandwidth, the M1 Pro has 200 GB/s bandwidth and the M1 Max has 400 GB/s bandwidth.[8] The M1 Pro comes in memory configurations of 16 GB and 32 GB, and the M1 Max comes in configurations of 32 GB and 64 GB.[17]
The M1 Ultra doubles the specs of the M1 Max for a 1024-bit or 1-kilobit memory bus with 800 GB/s bandwidth in a 64 GB or 128 GB configuration.
The M1 is the successor to and integrates all functionality of the Apple T2 chip that was present in Intel-based Macs. It keeps bridgeOS and sepOS active even if the main computer is in a halted low power mode to handle and store encryption keys, including keys for Touch ID, FileVault, macOS Keychain, and UEFI firmware passwords. It also stores the machine's unique ID (UID) and group ID (GID).
The M1 contains dedicatedneural network hardware in a 16-core Neural Engine, capable of executing 11 trillion operations per second.[8] Other components include animage signal processor, aNVM Express storage controller, aUSB4 controller that includesThunderbolt 3 support, and aSecure Enclave. The M1 Pro, Max and Ultra supportThunderbolt 4.
The M1 has video codec encoding support forHEVC andH.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, andProRes.[18] The M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra have a media engine which has hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW. This media engine includes a video decode engine (the M1 Ultra has two), a video encode engine (the M1 Max has two and the M1 Ultra has four), and a ProRes encode and decode engine (again the M1 Max has two and the M1 Ultra has four).[19][20]
The M1 Max supports High Power Mode on the 16-inch MacBook Pro for intensive tasks.[21] The M1 Pro supports two 6K displays at 60 Hz over Thunderbolt, while the M1 Max supports a third 6K display over Thunderbolt and a4K monitor overHDMI 2.0.[17] All parameters of the M1 Max processors are doubled in M1 Ultra processors, as they are essentially two M1 Max processors operating in parallel; they are in a single package (in size being bigger thanSocket AM4AMD Ryzen processors)[22] and seen as one processor in macOS.
The M1 recorded competitive performance with contemporary Intel and AMD processors in popular benchmarks (such asGeekbench andCinebench R23).[23]
The 2020 M1-equippedMac Mini draws 7 watts when idle and 39 watts at maximum load,[24] compared to 20 watts at idle and 122 watts maximum load for the 2018 6-core Core i7 Mac Mini.[25] Theenergy efficiency of the M1 increases battery life of M1-based MacBooks by 50% compared to previous Intel-based MacBooks.[26]
At release, the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) and MacBook Pro (M1, 2020) were praised by critics for their CPU performance and battery life, particularly compared to previous MacBooks.[27][28]
After its release, some users who charged M1 devices through USB-C hubs reportedbricking their device.[34] The devices that are reported to cause this issue were third-party USB-C hubs and non-Thunderbolt docks (excluding Apple's own dongle).[34] Apple handled this issue by replacing the logic board and by telling its customers not to charge through those hubs.[34]macOS Big Sur 11.2.2 includes a fix to prevent 2019 or later MacBook Pro models and 2020 or later MacBook Air models from being damaged by certain third-party USB-C hubs and docks.[35][36]
A flaw in M1 processors, given the name "M1racles", was announced in May 2021. Two sandboxed applications can exchange data without the system's knowledge by using an unintentionally writableprocessor register as acovert channel, violating the security model and constituting a minor vulnerability. It was discovered byHector Martin, founder of theAsahi Linux project for Linux on Apple Silicon.[37]
In May 2022 a flaw termed "Augury" was announced involving theData-Memory Dependent Prefetcher (DMP) in M1 chips, discovered by researchers atTel Aviv University, theUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and theUniversity of Washington. It was not considered a substantial security risk at the time.[38]
In June 2022,MIT researchers announced they had found aspeculative execution vulnerability in M1 chips which they called "Pacman" after pointer authentication codes (PAC).[39] Apple said they did not believe this posed a serious threat to users.[40]
An exploit namedGoFetch[41] is able to extract cryptographic keys from M-series chip devices without administrative privileges.[42]
The table below shows the various SoCs based on the "Firestorm" and "Icestorm" microarchitectures.[43][44]
| Variant | CPU cores (P+E) | GPU | NPU | Memory | Transistor count | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cores | EU | ALU | Cores | Performance | Size | Bandwidth | |||
| A14 Bionic | 6 (2+4) | 4 | 64 | 512 | 16 | 11 TOPS | 4–6 GB | 34.1 GB/s | 11.8 billion |
| M1 | 8 (4+4) | 7 | 112 | 896 | 8–16 GB | 68.3 GB/s | 16 billion | ||
| 8 | 128 | 1024 | |||||||
| M1 Pro | 8 (6+2) | 14 | 224 | 1792 | 16–32 GB | 204.8 GB/s | 33.7 billion | ||
| 10 (8+2) | |||||||||
| 16 | 256 | 2048 | |||||||
| M1 Max | 10 (8+2) | 24 | 384 | 3072 | 32–64 GB | 409.6 GB/s | 57 billion | ||
| 32 | 512 | 4096 | |||||||
| M1 Ultra | 20 (16+4) | 48 | 768 | 6144 | 32 | 22 TOPS | 64–128 GB | 819.2 GB/s | 114 billion |
| 64 | 1024 | 8192 | |||||||
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