Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a series of ARM-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., launched in 2020. It is part of the Apple silicon series, as a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU), used for its Macdesktops and notebooks and iPad Pro and iPad Airtablets. The M1 chip initiated Apple's third change to the instruction set architecture used by Macintosh computers, switching from Intel to Apple silicon fourteen years after they switched from PowerPC to Intel, and twenty-six years after their transition from the Motorola 68000 series to PowerPC. 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 CPU performance per watt. Its successor, Apple M2, was announced on June 6, 2022, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

The original M1 chip was introduced in November 2020, and was followed by the professional-focused M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in October 2021. The M1 Pro shipped with 6 performance and 2 efficiency cores in its default binned configuration, with an optional upgrade to 8 performance cores. The M1 Pro is a scaled up variant of the M1 chip, featuring more powerful and numerous CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, by using LPDDR5 memory at a higher frequency, memory bandwidth increased to 200GB/s.

The M1 Max is a higher-powered version of the M1 Pro with a larger die size. It doubled the GPU cores and memory bandwidth to 32 cores and 400GB/s respectively, keeping the same 10 core CPU.

Apple later introduced the M1 Ultra in 2022, a desktop workstation chip containing two M1 Max units physically interconnected via 'UltraFusion'. This allowed a low-latency high-throughput interconnect (2.5TB/s) between each chip, effectively doubling performance. These chips differ largely in size and the number of functional units: for example, while the original M1 has about 16 billion transistors, the M1 Ultra has 114 billion.

Apple's macOS and iPadOSoperating systems both run on the M1 as they run on the same Darwin kernel. Additionally, through the Asahi Linux project, initial support for the M1 SoC in the Linux kernel was released in version 5.13 on June 27, 2021.