A few days ago, Apple released three new computers equipped with self-developed ARM architecture M 1 chips. Of course, again, I can't afford to pay attention to Apple, but I have seen news about M 1 chip every day recently, saying that compared with the previous generation, the computing performance has improved by three times, the image performance has improved by five times, and the power consumption has actually dropped significantly. So I looked into it. You know, the annual performance improvement of Intel processors in recent years is about 20% to 30%, and Apple's M 1 has been done several times directly, so I was wondering how this order of performance improvement was achieved. I just read some information related to chips recently, so I dare to talk about this M 1 chip.

Development of CPU

Why is Apple's self-developed M 1 chip so strong? I think these four points are particularly important.

This chart shows the development of CPU in these decades. The yellow curve refers to the number of transistors, which can be seen to increase year by year, basically in line with Moore's law. Compared with this explosive development in the past few decades, we can see that the increase in the number of transistors has gradually decreased in recent years.

The blue line indicates the performance improvement of CPU single core. It can be seen that since 2005, the performance of the single core has been in a weak state, and the frequency of the core is limited by the effects of heating, technology, design and quantum tunneling. These problems have reached the bottleneck. The same situation can be seen from the curve of frequency increase in the same period. Basically, the biggest factor that restricts the performance of a single core is frequency.

At the same time, the black curve below, that is, the explosive growth of the number of cores, can draw a conclusion that the development of CPU has now entered the bottleneck of single-core promotion. Only by increasing the number of cores and optimizing the application software can we make full use of these multi-cores and multi-threads and improve the execution efficiency of CPU.

M 1 chip that is seriously underestimated.

Why is Apple's self-developed M 1 chip so strong? I think these four points are particularly important.

I can tell you responsibly that the M 1 chip released at this conference has been seriously underestimated by everyone. In a few years, when you look back at this conference, you will realize that the M 1 chip is no less than when the iPhone redefined the mobile phone, or that the iPad opened the era of tablet computers.

The conference was named OneMoreThing, and every time this slogan was followed by a product with market strategic significance in the era of Jobs, it can be seen that Apple's own positioning of M 1 chip was very clear, and the Mac computer released at the conference had not been received, but the running score of M 1 chip had been leaked. Single-core performance and multi-core performance have seriously exceeded everyone's expectations, and even exceeded the IntelXeon processor of 20 19 MacPro. There is no doubt that M 1 chip shows great potential, so what is the reason for the high energy consumption and low power consumption of M 1 chip? I think there are four main points.

First, the advantages of the reduced instruction set of ARM architecture.

Why is Apple's self-developed M 1 chip so strong? I think these four points are particularly important.