I am writing this article on an Apple MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 chip. You wouldn’t know by looking at it, but this computer represents a bold leap of faith for Apple. It seems crazy that at launch time, neither the operating system nor the applications to run on it were entirely ready. However, Apple has been down this road before.

A new direction for Apple

The M1 chip was the first release in Apple’s move from using microchips produced by Intel to producing its own Silicon chips. The chip has received rave reviews for its incredible performance and efficiency, and it’s the culmination of more than a decade of work by Apple on chips initially created for the iPhone and the iPad.

You may not be familiar with the complexities of processor technology and may not understand how software interacts with hardware, so you may not see how complicated this transition was. In simplest terms, software is developed to work with a specific type of processor technology, and different kinds of chips have different processor technology. That means that if you change to a new type of chip, like moving from an Intel chip to the new Apple Silicon, all the software needs to be updated to work on the new system.

Not the first time

This is not the first time Apple has been through a transition like this. Back in 2006, Apple made a move from the PowerPC processor technology to new Intel chips. It dealt with the same problem. Current software would not run on Macs with the new chips, and new software designed for the new chips wouldn’t run on the older Macs. Apple had a solution then, and they are using a similar solution now. Unfortunately, the first time, the solution caused nightmares for the early adopters. Thankfully, this time, things seem much smoother.

Rosetta and Rosetta 2

The solution Apple introduced back in 2006 was called Rosetta, and it has been reborn as Rosetta 2. In layman’s terms, Rosetta is a software translation tool. The first iteration of Rosetta allowed users to run software developed for the PowerPC chips on Macs with the new Intel chips. While Rosetta was easy to use and required no user intervention to operate, it had limitations. It mostly worked fine for applications such as word processors that didn’t require a lot of computational power. However, when it came to more resource-intensive software like games or other graphics creation programs, Rosetta could not always keep up, leaving users waiting for the newer versions of the software to arrive.

Rosetta 2 has, so far, been more successful than its predecessor in helping users transition to new software developed specifically for the new Silicon chips. In some cases, software initially written for systems with Intel chips runs faster on the new M1 Macs through Rosetta. However, other software titles run sluggishly or don’t run at all.

Keep in mind that any software issues are usually dealt with by early adopters. By the time the average user gets their hands on a Mac with the new Silicon chip, most software will have been updated to run natively on the new hardware.

Why the switch?

Knowing that the transition to a new chip architecture can be difficult, why did Apple decide to switch to manufacturing its own chips? It came down to performance. While Intel chips facilitated a significant move forward in the switch from PowerPC, at some point, Intel was no longer making enough progress in improving performance. Apple decided that the best way to get the necessary performance was to create their own chips. This gave Apple the added advantage of crafting this hardware for even more benefits to the Mac user.

So, what’s next?

The M1 chip inside the MacBook Pro I am currently writing on is a massive step forward for computing technology. Still, it’s only one step. When Apple released the M1 chip at the end of 2020, we were blown away by the speed improvements over its Intel predecessors. A year later, Apple announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max, and then in March, Apple revealed the M1 Ultra.

One way to describe the difference is through the total number of transistors on each version of the chip. Transistors handle the real work of a processor chip. They control the flow of electricity across the chip, which is how it makes computations. In the simplest of terms, the more, the better.

So Apple’s M1 chip, which is inside my MacBook Pro, has 16 billion transistors. The new M1 Pro has twice that many, 33.7 billion transistors. The M1 Max has nearly twice that at 57 billion transistors, and the latest M1 Ultra doubles that number again with 114 billion.

But, of course, transistors aren’t the only difference. As you move up from M1 to M1 Ultra, the number of processing cores, graphics processing unit (GPU) cores, and memory capabilities also increase drastically. So again, in simple terms, each new chip is dramatically faster and more powerful than the previous.

What’s next?

Apple’s transition to Apple silicon is almost complete. We can now expect progressive year-on-year performance improvements. In addition, since they now have full control of the design of their chips, they could choose to push the concept of a system on a chip (SoC) even further by essentially packing even more computing components on one silicon chip, such as storage, power, and wireless connectivity. That could mean an entire computer on one tiny chip that could connect to the internet and use so little power it could be on all the time.

Would that be a good thing? Time will tell.

Header photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash