What you need to know
- Apple unveiled its first Apple silicon chip, the M1, earlier this week.
- Early benchmarks show that it is immensely powerful.
- A new report suggests the M1 may challenge Intel's dominance of the notebook CPU market, and pave the way for other vendors.
A new report says that industry sources expect Apple's M1 chip will challenge Intel's dominance of the notebook CPU market.
Apple's launch of new Macs with its own M1 chips means losses for Intel processor business. And M1 also comes as an encouragement for other Arm-based chip vendors to challenge the dominance of Intel. In the M1 ecosystem, Unimicron reportedly is the sole supplier of ABF susbstrates for the new Apple Silicon.
According to the report, the new M1 chip featured in Apple's new Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro is "expected" to challenge Intel's dominance of the notebook CPU market in the long term, according to sources within the industry. It will also reportedly pave the way for other Arm-based chip makers to enter the fray.
DigiTimes says the other big beneficiary at present will be Unimicron, which is currently the sole supplier of ABF substrates for the Apple M1 chip.
The report follows hot on the heels of the first M1 Apple silicon benchmark tests, which indicate that Apple's new M1 Macbook Air outperforms every single Mac currently available, including the high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro. The tests specifically indicate CPU performance, so it's likely that current-gen Intel Macs may still have the advantage when it comes to GPU performance.
Apple's new M1 chip is Apple's first-ever SoC for Mac, combining CPU, RAM, and the T2 all into one chip for big theoretical performance and efficiency gains.
Apple says the M1 is the most powerful chip it has ever created and features the world's faster CPU core in low-power silicon and the best CPU performance per watt.
