In a virtual event on Tuesday at 10am PST / 1pm EST, Apple is expected to introduce Mac computers with its own central processing unit chips, marking the beginning of the Cupertino Colossus’ move away from Intel CPUs.
The new chips, which will be unveiled in a webcast event on Tuesday, will make it far easier for the millions of apps currently available for iPhones to migrate to Macs, which have been overshadowed by smart phones.
The new “Apple Silicon” chips will mark a departure from Intel, whose chips Apple has used since 2006, when it successfully transitioned away from chips made by International Business Machines Corp. Intel has disclosed delays with its internal chipmaking operations that have caused it to fall behind TSMC in making smaller, more power-efficient chips.
Power efficiency – that is, getting the most computing done per watt of energy consumed – is one of Apple’s key aims.
“Normally, to get more performance you have to consume more power,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, said at an event announcing the chips in June. “Our plan is to give the Mac a much higher level of performance, while at the same time consuming less power.”
MacDailyNews Take: As Apple said back in June: “For over a decade, Apple’s world-class silicon design team has been building and refining Apple SoCs. The result is a scalable architecture custom designed for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch that leads the industry in unique features and performance per watt, and makes each of them best in class. Building upon this architecture, Apple is designing a family of SoCs for the Mac. This will give the Mac industry-leading performance per watt and higher performance GPUs — enabling app developers to write even more powerful pro apps and high-end games. And access to technologies such as the Neural Engine will make the Mac an amazing platform for developers to use machine learning. This will also create a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize software for the entire Apple ecosystem.”