First benchmarks are in!

The astonishing success of Apple silicon firmly puts to bed the nonsense that Apple under Tim Cook doesn’t innovate.

Apple silicon has led to breakthroughs like unified memory, specialist media encoder/decoders and dedicated AI-cores like the Neural Engine.

Aside from the fact that Apple silicon is but one innovation among dozens under Cook’s watch, Apple silicon stands as an enormous, outsized triumph. It did more than benefit Apple — it’s rewiring the entire chip industry.

With Apple silicon, Apple scaled up Arm’s power-efficient architecture to higher-power devices like laptops and workstations. (Previously, Arm processors appeared mostly in less demanding, lower-power devices like phones and tablets.)

Now, the entire chip industry is following suit, ditching the legacy Intel x86 architecture to focus on specialty silicon optimized for particular devices or tasks (like Nvidia’s AI chips).

And, as they say, Apple is just getting started. Take the benchmarks for the new MacBook Air, which is 50% faster than last year’s model — a pretty remarkable boost.

A few years ago, as chip miniaturization butted up against the limits of physics, industry watchers predicted the death of Moore’s law — the famous maxim that transistor counts double every two years.

If we instead count performance rather than the number of transistors, Apple silicon is keeping Moore’s law — and the chip industry — alive.

Also in today’s newsletter:

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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