What is Apple Silicon?
Apple Silicon is Apple's in-house design for Mac and iPad devices; It is an ARM-based high-performance SoC (System on a Chip) processor family that brings together the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and Unified Memory on a single silicon wafer.
Conceptual genesis, history and the great migration from x86 to ARM
"Silicon" is the basic chemical element used in the production of semiconductor microchips. Apple Silicon, on the other hand, represents a custom microprocessor design in which Apple vertically integrates its own hardware and software, ending its dependence on third-party chip manufacturers (Intel, Motorola, IBM).
Apple has a unique legacy in the history of computer architecture; The company has radically changed its platform architecture three times:
- 1994: Transition from the Motorola 68000 series to the PowerPC RISC architecture.
- 2006: Transition from PowerPC to Intel Core processors using the x86 architecture.
- 2020 (The Great Turning Point): Intel's x86 architecture was completely abandoned, and the Apple Silicon M series (M1, M2, M3, M4)·designed with 10 years of ARM experience gained from the A-series chips in iPhones·was announced.
This transformation broke the traditional CISC (complex instruction set) dominance in the computer industry, proving to the world that the modern 64-bit ARM RISC (reduced instruction set) architecture can also be at the top of high-performance personal computers.
System on chip (SoC) and Unified Memory Architecture (UMA)
In a traditional desktop or laptop, the hardware is fragmented: There's a separate CPU socket on the motherboard, a massive external graphics card (GPU) that plugs into a PCIe slot, separate RAM modules, and motherboard bridges. In order to print an image processed by the CPU on the screen, data must be copied from RAM to the GPU's own VRAM memory via the motherboard bus. This creates latency and high power consumption.
Apple Silicon radically breaks this paradigm:
- SoC (System on a Chip): The CPU, GPU, AI accelerator (NPU), image signal processor (ISP), and security hardware (Secure Enclave) are integrated onto a single silicon die.
- Unified Memory Architecture (UMA): High-speed LPDDR5X memory is integrated directly right next to the processor package. The CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine share the same memory pool with zero-copy. Thanks to a massive memory bandwidth of up to 800 GB/s, the overhead of transferring data from one unit to another is completely eliminated.
Number One in Native AI and LLM Inference: Unified Memory Architecture has effectively transformed Mac computers into AI workstations for developers in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Running a 70-billion-parameter open-source AI model (Llama 3 70B) on a standard PC requires professional server GPUs costing tens of thousands of dollars with at least 48-64 GB of VRAM. In contrast, an Apple Silicon Mac Studio with 128 GB of Unified Memory can allocate nearly all of this RAM to the GPU as a single pool. Thanks to the open-source MLX library developed by Apple, large language models can be run locally, quietly, and with low power consumption.
Core anatomy, accelerators and Rosetta 2
Apple Silicon's pure balance of performance and efficiency relies on three key engineering components:
- Heterogeneous Core Architecture (big.LITTLE): The processor houses two different core types together. Performance Cores (P-Cores) handle heavy workloads such as compiling and video processing with massive instruction execution width, while Efficiency Cores (E-Cores) execute background tasks and text editing with almost zero battery consumption.
- Dedicated Hardware Accelerators: Specialized task units are included to avoid burdening the general CPU: a Neural Engine for AI tensor calculations, an internal AMX (Apple Matrix Coprocessor) for matrix multiplications, and a hardware-based Media Engine (ProRes/AV1 decoder) for 8K video processing.
- Rosetta 2 Binary Translation: Older Mac applications compiled for Intel (x86_64) are automatically translated to ARM64 code the moment the user opens the application (AOT · Ahead-of-Time) thanks to Rosetta 2. Because Apple Silicon chips include hardware-level support for TSO (Total Store Ordering), which is the x86 memory model, this translation runs at near-native speeds.
Questions and answers
What does Apple Silicon mean and which processors does it cover?
It is an ARM-based System on Chip (SoC) processor family designed by Apple itself. They include the A-series chips in iPhones and iPads, as well as the M-series (M1, M2, M3, M4 and variants) processors that power Mac computers.
Why is Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) different from traditional RAM and VRAM?
In traditional systems, the CPU has a separate system RAM, the graphics card has a separate VRAM, and data is copied between the two. In UMA, the memory is directly in the processor package; The CPU, GPU, and AI engine access the same memory pool at zero cost, with no copy latency.
Will older Intel apps run on a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor?
Yes, thanks to the Rosetta 2 translation engine integrated into the macOS operating system, the majority of applications written for Intel (x86_64) run at high speed without the user noticing.
Why is Apple Silicon so popular for native AI (LLM) development?
Because thanks to the Unified Memory Architecture, huge memory pools such as 64 GB, 96 GB or 128 GB can be used directly by the GPU as VRAM. This allows running huge language models with 70B+ parameters locally without expensive server GPUs.
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This explanation was written in plain language for TreScout with AI and machine-translated from the Turkish original · the Turkish version prevails. If something looks wrong or missing, write to hello@trescout.com. Read in Turkish →