Yesterday, at its ‘One More Thing’ event, Apple announced the first MacBook touting an in-house ARM-based processor. The device launched is the famous 13-inch MacBook Air, which looks pretty much like its predecessor but drops the Intel processor.
Design and Display
Like the previous MacBook Air, this newly launched notebook also comes with a 13.3-inch Retina Display with 2560 x 1600 resolution, 400 nits of brightness, and support for DCI-P3 color space as well as True Tone tech.
Processor
The laptop is powered by Apple’s first Mac chipset called M1. According to the company, the System on Chip comes with many superlatives, including the world’s fastest CPU core, fastest integrated GPU, and massive gains in energy efficiency. Apple claims it is up to 3.5 times the CPU performance of the previous-gen Air and up to 5 times faster graphics. The SSDs are said to be two times faster too.
M1 is a 5nm chip with 16 billion transistors. It is designed using unified memory architecture similar to mobile chips and console APUs. The CPU is constructed using four big and four smaller cores. The big cores share 12MB of L2 cache, while the smaller ones have 4MB of L2. Apple claims that the combination makes the SoC twice as fast as the “latest PC laptop chip” when limited to 10W TDP.
Moving on to the GPU, it features an Octa-core design, totaling 128 execution units. The GPU can perform up to 2.6 TFLOPS – that’s faster than Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti, which only offers 2.1 TFLOPS.
Other than this, the new processor comes with advanced media encode/decode engines, an image signal processor, Apple’s secure enclave, and support for Thunderbolt.
Other features
Most of the features, save the processor, have been borrowed by the previous generation MacBook Air. The newly launched device comes with a better and bigger battery. According to the numbers revealed by Cupertino, the notebook will provide 15 hours of battery life when browsing the web and 18 hours of offline video playback. This is 6 hours more than its predecessor.
Furthermore, the device comes with Touch ID, two Thunderbolt ports with USB 4 support, and support for Wi-Fi 6. It is available in the 8GB/256GB configuration for now.
Pricing and Availability
The MacBook Air with M1 pre-orders will start later today. The base model of the laptop costs $999, however, if you opt for one extra GPU core and double the storage space, you’ll have to pay an additional $250.
