Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

Eug · Nov 10, 2020

M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:

M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

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M1 Ultra discussion here:

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M2 discussion here:

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Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

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M4 Family discussion here:

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name99 · Apr 22, 2025

mikegg said:
Looks like the Macs are being used as VMs for developers or as build machines.

A lot of companies rent Mac Mini VMs from AWS for their developers.

Apple should really have their own Mac rental cloud in my opinion. Imagine being able to rent the power of an M3 Ultra or M5 Extreme directly from Apple's cloud.

I assumed this was for exolabs (or at least running exolabs SW).

name99 · Apr 22, 2025

mikegg said:
Looks like the Macs are being used as VMs for developers or as build machines.

A lot of companies rent Mac Mini VMs from AWS for their developers.

Apple should really have their own Mac rental cloud in my opinion. Imagine being able to rent the power of an M3 Ultra or M5 Extreme directly from Apple's cloud.

We have Private Cloud Compute and XCode in the Cloud as the first two steps to this. I wouldn't be surprised if a next step is announced at WWDC.
WWDC in two months...

Rigg · Apr 22, 2025

johnsonwax said:
In fairness, they aren't particularly well suited to a 19" rack either. For $100 you can get a mount for 3 M4 minis in 2U. So 2 racks, plus another $3K in mounts. Another $5K isn't huge, but not nothing either.

https://www.racksolutions.com/m4-mac-mini-apple-hypershelf.html

Rack Solutions has some pretty neat products for this kind of thing.

Doug S · Apr 22, 2025

johnsonwax said:
In fairness, they aren't particularly well suited to a 19" rack either. For $100 you can get a mount for 3 M4 minis in 2U. So 2 racks, plus another $3K in mounts. Another $5K isn't huge, but not nothing either.

I would imagine you could 3D print mounting hardware. Minis aren't heavy and don't get hot so they'd be fine to print out of plastic. You could also use wood, buy whatever the cheapest 2x2 sheeting you can find and cut it to size, then use the scraps to attach "ears" to the front that can be screwed to the rack.

My main complaint wasn't that you gotta use a rack, but that this guy HAS a half empty rack just sitting there and he decided to buy that wire shelving instead of finding a way to use the rack.

Mopetar · Apr 22, 2025

okoroezenwa said:
I wouldn’t be too hopeful considering they still haven’t gotten back into WiFi routers on their own (+ 5G Macs).

I've long wished they would release an expandable home media server akin to their old Time Capsule router/NAS units.

They could probably use it as a way to get people to buy their cloud service as another backup layer on top of that all as well.

I've got a non-Apple solution doing some of that right now, but something that offers the usual slick Apple integration that they sell would be tempting.

Doug S · Apr 23, 2025

Mopetar said:
I've long wished they would release an expandable home media server akin to their old Time Capsule router/NAS units.

They could probably use it as a way to get people to buy their cloud service as another backup layer on top of that all as well.

I've got a non-Apple solution doing some of that right now, but something that offers the usual slick Apple integration that they sell would be tempting.

One of the reasons Apple is so successful is that they don't enter new product categories willy nilly, especially not product categories that are commoditized like NAS which every wifi router supports these days. How is what you want really different than a Mini running Time Machine and NAS?

name99 · Apr 24, 2025

Mopetar said:
I've long wished they would release an expandable home media server akin to their old Time Capsule router/NAS units.

They could probably use it as a way to get people to buy their cloud service as another backup layer on top of that all as well.

I've got a non-Apple solution doing some of that right now, but something that offers the usual slick Apple integration that they sell would be tempting.

Are you unaware that Apple automatically includes pretty good RAID SW? (And has done so for decades.) I've used it for over 20 years and never had a problem (as opposed to the occasional horror stories I hear from people running dedicated NAS').
So collect as many drives as you want, hook them up to a mac mini (using USB hubs if necessary) and learn about the command
diskutil ar
[diskutil does a million different things. diskutil ar is the subcommand that does AppleRaid related things]

I have, I don't ?10? disks connected to my mac mini that doing exactly what you want, acting as a media server plus second tier ("network") backup for the rest of the house. (One reason I have so many drives is not that I have oceans of data, but that Apple does a great job of allowing you to glue together random old drives to create a larger backup volume, so this is a way I continue to get value from 20 yr old drives that are maybe 500GB or 1TB in size, and that haven't yet died.)

I personally use Channels DVR for media, but if you hate yourself you can certainly use Plex or some other alternative.

LightningZ71 · Apr 24, 2025

MS has a similar product called Storage Spaces. I've used it for years for all sorts of things. My favorite is to build tiered storage arrays with Optane drives as a solid state cache for big RAID 5/6 HDD arrays.

Storage has come a long way.

dr1337 · Friday at 3:33 AM

name99 said:
So collect as many drives as you want, hook them up to a mac mini (using USB hubs if necessary)

Comparing USB hubs to SATA and/or PCIE is kinda nuts. Buying a PC and using its general purpose IO for disk management is always going to be inferior to a dedicated NAS like time capsule was.

Its pretty obvious that Apples current strategy is to push icloud (which hasn't changed significantly in prices even since steve jobs first announced it), and push Mac Pro's onto anyone smart enough with money to afford it.

You can glue drives together on any platform these days, but if you want to have comparable NAS performance in the Mac space as what you get on x86, its gonna cost you BIG TIME.

LightningZ71 · Friday at 6:09 AM

Eh, depending on what you really need to do, it isn't as bad as you'd think. USB 3.1 speeds are more than enough to handle the throughput of multiple HDDs in a single enclosure. Yes, there's a latency hit, but it's only noticeable under the microscope of benchmarking. Yes, if you start to go over 4-6 drive arrays, it can get a bit questionable, but then, you're getting into large device territory.

name99 · Friday at 1:47 PM

dr1337 said:
Comparing USB hubs to SATA and/or PCIE is kinda nuts. Buying a PC and using its general purpose IO for disk management is always going to be inferior to a dedicated NAS like time capsule was.

Neither I nor Apple are psychic. We especially cannot understand the desires of someone who simultaneously claims that USB4 or TB bandwidth is too slow for their needs AND that cloud storage somehow matches that same need.

Look I have no idea what you have in mind.
The average NORMAL person using a NAS requires performance good enough to
- maybe watch one movie while simultaneously recoding two others
- back up their data.
If USB4 (hell if USB2) isn't good enough for those needs, you are not an average person. Yes, if you are editing 8K video you need something more. You're also not an average user.

dr1337 said:
Its pretty obvious that Apples current strategy is to push icloud (which hasn't changed significantly in prices even since steve jobs first announced it), and push Mac Pro's onto anyone smart enough with money to afford it.

You can glue drives together on any platform these days, but if you want to have comparable NAS performance in the Mac space as what you get on x86, its gonna cost you BIG TIME.

I lose interest when this sort of conspiracy theorizing enters the chat.
Especially when pretty much every low-end NAS (Synology or whatever) is trivially connectable to a Mac.

I've told you what the tech capabilities are. If your response is to show no interest in the tech capabilities because you don't ACTUALLY have a problem to solve, you simply want something to whine about, well, we have nothing to discuss.

dr1337 · Friday at 1:54 PM

name99 said:
USB4 or TB bandwidth is too slow for their needs AND that cloud storage somehow matches that same need.

I'd be really impressed if you're actually maxing out USB4 bandwidth. And I'm not saying iCloud matches in performance at all, I'm just saying apple would rather sell a subscription service than offer a NAS product again.

name99 said:
I lose interest when this sort of conspiracy theorizing enters the chat.
Especially when pretty much every low-end NAS (Synology or whatever) is trivially connectable to a Mac.

What? I'm talking about if you want to buy an apple product as a NAS. You're making a wild assumption here and I actually misread your post at first because of it. Its not a conspiracy that you can hook any NAS up to a mac, but its a fact apple doesn't sell a NAS product like time capsule anymore and I think its for a reason other than USB storage exists.

LightningZ71 · Friday at 3:09 PM

The sad part is that it would be trivial to use defective AppleTVs to host the Time Capsule service with a generic externally attached USB HDD/SSD enclosure. Heck, it could be a value-added capability that could help push volumes on the thing.

Doug S · Friday at 3:40 PM

dr1337 said:
I'd be really impressed if you're actually maxing out USB4 bandwidth. And I'm not saying iCloud matches in performance at all, I'm just saying apple would rather sell a subscription service than offer a NAS product again.

iCloud is never going to be a big money maker, they sell it for convenience. This idea that they won't make a NAS because they want you pay per month for iCloud is on the same level as people who used to claim Apple sticks with Lightning because they want to sell proprietary cables. When you have a market cap of $3 trillion, you don't go crawling on the floor to pick up lost coins.

It is easy to take the lame interpretation of "Apple is greedy and they want that iCloud subscription money" but that's such a laughably tiny percentage of their overall revenue when the obvious reason is staring you in the face. An Apple branded NAS product would never sell well enough to be a viable product.

Fast broadband made a lot of people prefer the cloud because it is convenient (use anywhere not just at home, don't have to worry about data loss or backups) and every wireless router supports NAS so you have to not only want NAS rather than cloud but be willing to pay for something better than you already have for free. Even then Apple has to compete with others, and realizes that there are some people who wouldn't ever buy their product (hate Apple, think price is too high, assumes Apple products are only for Mac/iPhone owners) even if Apple offered it.

name99 · Saturday at 4:14 PM

LightningZ71 said:
The sad part is that it would be trivial to use defective AppleTVs to host the Time Capsule service with a generic externally attached USB HDD/SSD enclosure. Heck, it could be a value-added capability that could help push volumes on the thing.

Apple GIVES YOU THIS TODAY, FFS.
Not with an aTV but with a mini. Buy a 10 yr old mini, connect drives to it, and you are golden.

It's so tiresome to keep hearing this whining from people who are so clueless about what Apple machinery can do right now. You do know, don't you, that you can run a backup from any mac to any other mac over the network, right?

This is one way to do it. There are others:

Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac

On a Mac, share a folder that other Mac computers on your network can use for Time Machine backups.

support.apple.com

Mopetar · Saturday at 5:39 PM

Doug S said:
One of the reasons Apple is so successful is that they don't enter new product categories willy nilly, especially not product categories that are commoditized like NAS which every wifi router supports these days. How is what you want really different than a Mini running Time Machine and NAS?

I fully understand that most people don't need, let alone want what I'm proposing but I want an 8+ drive NAS that serves media, backs up all of my devices, and can act as extra swap space for large video projects that spit out a lot of render files. Apple could easily sell additional cloud storage integration on top of that.

The market for this is not large enough to even be worth them thinking about it, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it. I think they could be good at it, but I am well aware there are plenty of other things worth way more money that they could also be good at.

Doug S · Saturday at 6:34 PM

Mopetar said:
I fully understand that most people don't need, let alone want what I'm proposing but I want an 8+ drive NAS that serves media, backs up all of my devices, and can act as extra swap space for large video projects that spit out a lot of render files. Apple could easily sell additional cloud storage integration on top of that.

The market for this is not large enough to even be worth them thinking about it, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it. I think they could be good at it, but I am well aware there are plenty of other things worth way more money that they could also be good at.

And what stops you from DIYing this using an M1 Mini you bought off eBay?

LightningZ71 · Sunday at 12:05 AM

Why would I want to trust that task to a 10 year old piece of gear that's excluded from any further OS updates? The current Apple TV has more than enough capability to do that now, they just haven't implemented it to my knowledge.

oak8292 · Sunday at 12:09 PM

LightningZ71 said:
Why would I want to trust that task to a 10 year old piece of gear that's excluded from any further OS updates? The current Apple TV has more than enough capability to do that now, they just haven't implemented it to my knowledge.

I think you are looking for the lowest cost Apple device with an M processor versus A processor. The M processors have Thunderbolt for faster data transfers. The AppleTV is an A processor and they could even be rejects that didn’t meet speed or thermal requirements for phones. The original AppleTV had single core processors which suggested they may have been rejects.

Doug S · Sunday at 2:52 PM

LightningZ71 said:
Why would I want to trust that task to a 10 year old piece of gear that's excluded from any further OS updates? The current Apple TV has more than enough capability to do that now, they just haven't implemented it to my knowledge.

They'd need to add a USB port to the Apple TV for it to be able to usefully function as a NAS. They already have a "high end" model that includes an ethernet port and acts as a Thread hub (Homekit/Matter smarthome stuff) so there's a possible path where they could add that as an option without raising the price of the base model.

Since they built it from iPhone SoCs one of the reasons it doesn't have one may be that no iPhone SoC supported anything other than USB2 until A18P, which supports USB3. So a USB port would have been useless, at least as far as storage goes. A future Apple TV built from an SoC that supports USB3 could at least have a functionally useful USB port.

That's not to say they will, I'm only saying its possible. But given that the base A18 is still USB2 and there's no real reason to use the "Pro" version to built Apple TVs unless they have a surplus of them I wouldn't hold my breath. Probably the best hope would be if the "high end" Apple TV that includes the ethernet port also gets the Pro SoC, or they start including USB3 in the base SoCs down the road. Even then they'd have to be convinced there's a reason to include a USB port, AND to allow it to support storage AND to allow Apple TV apps to make use of that storage.

name99 · Sunday at 4:10 PM

Mopetar said:
I fully understand that most people don't need, let alone want what I'm proposing but I want an 8+ drive NAS that serves media, backs up all of my devices, and can act as extra swap space for large video projects that spit out a lot of render files. Apple could easily sell additional cloud storage integration on top of that.

The market for this is not large enough to even be worth them thinking about it, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it. I think they could be good at it, but I am well aware there are plenty of other things worth way more money that they could also be good at.

This has evolved from "Apple won't allow me to do what I want" to "Apple doesn't sell it in the color I want".

You are clearly not serious in your claimed desires - if you were you'd now be asking tech questions about how to do this, not finding ever more foolish reasons why what Apple does provide isn't exactly correct.

name99 · Sunday at 4:12 PM

LightningZ71 said:
Why would I want to trust that task to a 10 year old piece of gear that's excluded from any further OS updates? The current Apple TV has more than enough capability to do that now, they just haven't implemented it to my knowledge.

Why wouldn't you? Especially if the machine doesn't need to touch random internet addresses, quite possibly none at all.
If ALL you need is a media server and backup NAS, you can block it from the entire external internet.

Rigg · Sunday at 4:29 PM

Hello @name99 ,

Would it possible to take your abrasive attitude towards other posters down from an 80-Grit to a 600-Grit or so?

Kind regards,

Everyone who reads your posts

Doug S · Sunday at 4:34 PM

name99 said:
Why wouldn't you? Especially if the machine doesn't need to touch random internet addresses, quite possibly none at all.
If ALL you need is a media server and backup NAS, you can block it from the entire external internet.

The worry over platform security isn't limited to direct attacks from the external internet. Most of us are behind NATs so there is no real concern over someone halfway across the world being able to directly connect to open ports on devices inside our home network. But there is plenty of concern for any code we run inside our network (whether an application or e.g. javascript on a web site) may contain malicious code which pokes around our internal network looking for vulnerable devices to p0wn.

Something running NAS software would be a potential target because it contains a lot of storage. If you're just using it for media files like a Plex server who cares, but if you had copies of your tax returns on it or whatever you wouldn't want your NAS running with a dozen known unpatched vulnerabilities.

poke01 · Tuesday at 7:32 AM

Sina Visitor System

dcs is a vey good leaker. iPhone 18 Pro will have 6 channel memory. Whats the current memory channel for iphone 16 pro?

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