Apple Silicon

Apple silicon is the umbrella term for Apple's own ARM-based chip families that today power virtually every device coming out of Cupertino. The iPhone and more affordable MacBooks use A chips, the Mac, iPad Pro and Vision Pro rely on the powerful M chips with Pro, Max and Ultra variants, the Apple Watch runs on compact S chips, AirPods on specialized H chips, and Vision Pro additionally uses the R chip for sensor processing. With the Mac's transition from Intel to Apple silicon starting in 2020, Apple aligned its entire hardware strategy around a unified, energy-efficient architecture – with high performance per watt, an integrated Neural Engine for AI calculations, and unified memory between CPU and GPU.

The Apple silicon reporting on apfelpatient.de runs under this tag: background on every new M, A, S, H and R generation, benchmark comparisons between generations, detailed reports on architecture and TSMC manufacturing, reporting on supply chains and new US manufacturing initiatives, context on the Pro, Max and Ultra differentiation, comparisons with Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and Nvidia, and all rumors and reports about upcoming chip generations and their role in future iPhones, iPads, Macs and headsets.

Anyone wanting to understand Apple's chip strategy from the technical side, place performance jumps between generations in context or follow the long-term hardware roadmap has their technical control room right here.