Apple Says no to Intel: Future Products Will make Use of Their Own ARM-Based Processors

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In case you read the press announcements from Apple, you might have noticed a pretty big shift in the silicon paradigm. Apple will no longer make use of Intel processors for their future products, but rather will move to their own developed  SoCs based on ARM architecture.



We'd figure to take the press release towards a separated news-item, as it is really big news and a blow in the face for Intel. Apple has confirmed the rumor that has been going around for years, opting out on Intel CPUs and moving to its own custom processors. The company announced that it will have its first Macs with its own processors later this year. They will continue to launch products with Intel processors for a few years, but how many years that will be is not really known. In any case, the transition process will take at least 2 years to complete. The company has already shown one powered by an Apple A12Z Bionic chip to demonstrate performance. The new SoC is less powerful than the upcoming 5nm Apple A14, but Apple showed that it was capable of running Final Cut Pro and editing 4K video from 3 different sources simultaneously while moving an Apple screen. 

Apple announced it has been working on a family of these Mac SoCs and that all of the demos shown earlier today were to showcase the features of macOS Big Sur, which were performed on that ARM-based Mac. The transition to Apple's own SoCs will give Macs industry-leading performance per watt and is also working on high-performance GPUs as well, confirming that the company will be moving away from Intel (and AMD) in the future. Macs with this new ARM Silicon will have access to the Neural Engine, which will allow developers to take advantage of machine learning performance at billions of instructions per second.

Apple aims to improve the performance per watt on its Mac processors with its custom silicon, something it has not been able to achieve with Intel processors. Although Apple did not show any graphs to compare the performance of its processor with Intel, it showed the following comparison during the event.



Apple Says no to Intel: Future Products Will make Use of Their Own ARM-Based Processors


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