Apple Silicon
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Last reviewed
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Apple silicon is a family of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc. and based on the ARM architecture. The family encompasses the A-series chips that power iPhones and most iPads, the M-series chips that power Macs and high-end iPads since 2020, and several smaller specialized chips for the Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro, and cellular modems. All current Apple silicon products are manufactured by TSMC on leading-edge process nodes.
Apple began designing its own application processors after acquiring P.A. Semi in 2008, shipping the first Apple-designed chip, the Apple A4, in the original iPad in April 2010. The company surprised the industry in 2013 with the Apple A7, the first 64-bit chip in a smartphone, and added a dedicated neural network accelerator called the Apple Neural Engine to the A11 Bionic in 2017. In June 2020, Apple announced a two-year transition of its Mac line away from Intel x86 processors to Apple silicon, beginning with the Apple M1 in November 2020.
For artificial intelligence and machine learning, Apple silicon plays a central role in Apple's strategy of on-device AI. Each chip combines high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores, an Apple-designed GPU, and a Neural Engine that accelerates matrix and convolution workloads. The shared LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X memory connected to the package, called unified memory, gives the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine simultaneous access to the same data without copying. This architecture has made M-series Macs popular platforms for running large language model inference locally and motivated Apple's release of the MLX framework in December 2023, alongside the existing Core ML runtime, to give researchers and developers efficient access to the hardware.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Apple Inc. |
| Manufactured by | TSMC |
| Architecture | ARM, 64-bit ARMv8-A and ARMv9-A |
| First chip | Apple A4 (April 2010) |
| First Mac chip | Apple M1 (November 10, 2020) |
| Current iPhone chip | Apple A19 / A19 Pro (September 2025) |
| Current Mac chip | Apple M5 family (October 2025) |
| Process nodes used | TSMC N5, N5P, N4P, N3B, N3E, N3P |
| Lead designer | Johny Srouji |
| Major divisions | A-series (iPhone, iPad), M-series (Mac, iPad Pro, Vision Pro), S-series (Apple Watch), H-series (AirPods), W- and U-series (wireless), C-series (modem), R-series (sensor coprocessor) |
Apple began building an in-house silicon team in April 2008 with the acquisition of P.A. Semi, a low-power processor design firm in Santa Clara, for approximately $278 million. The deal added roughly 150 engineers to Apple, and the team was led by Johny Srouji, who had joined Apple earlier that year after holding senior chip-design roles at Intel and IBM. In April 2010, Apple acquired the chip-design firm Intrinsity for approximately $121 million, adding more talent to the silicon group.
The first chip designed by the new team, the Apple A4, debuted with the original iPad announced on January 27, 2010 and launched on April 3, 2010, and shortly after appeared in the iPhone 4 and the second-generation Apple TV. The A4 used a single ARM Cortex-A8 CPU core and a PowerVR GPU, fabricated by Samsung. The follow-on Apple A5 in 2011 introduced a dual-core Cortex-A9 design.
On September 10, 2013, Apple announced the Apple A7, the world's first 64-bit ARM SoC shipped in a smartphone, inside the iPhone 5s. The A7 used Apple's first custom CPU core design, codenamed Cyclone, and implemented the ARMv8-A instruction set. Industry observers, including engineers at Qualcomm, were caught off guard by the early move to 64-bit. The A7 also introduced the Secure Enclave, a separate coprocessor for biometric and key-management operations.
Apple branded its 2017 chip the A11 Bionic, marketing the addition of the first Apple Neural Engine, a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) with two cores capable of about 0.6 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The Neural Engine first powered Face ID and Animoji on the iPhone X. Apple expanded the unit to eight cores in the A12 Bionic (2018), reaching about 5 TOPS, and to 16 cores in the A14 Bionic (2020) at about 11 TOPS.
Alongside main application processors, Apple released the T1 (2016) and T2 (2017 to 2018) security and controller chips for Intel-based Macs. The T2, derived from the A10 Fusion, ran a separate operating system named bridgeOS and handled Touch ID, the Secure Enclave, SSD encryption, an image signal processor for the FaceTime camera, and audio playback.
At the all-virtual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 22, 2020, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a two-year transition of the Mac line from Intel processors to Apple silicon. Apple shipped a Developer Transition Kit, a Mac mini using the iPad Pro's A12Z chip, to registered developers during WWDC week.
Apple unveiled the Apple M1 on November 10, 2020. Built on TSMC's N5 (5 nm) process, the M1 contained 16 billion transistors, an 8-core CPU split between four high-performance Firestorm cores and four high-efficiency Icestorm cores, an integrated 7- or 8-core GPU, a 16-core Neural Engine rated at 11 TOPS, and a unified memory architecture with up to 16 GB of LPDDR4X. The first M1 Macs, the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini, shipped on November 17, 2020.
Apple announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max on October 18, 2021 alongside redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. The M1 Pro contained 33.7 billion transistors and offered 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M1 Max contained 57 billion transistors with 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth and up to 64 GB of unified memory. On March 8, 2022, Apple introduced the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio; the M1 Ultra fused two M1 Max dies via a custom interconnect Apple branded UltraFusion, yielding 114 billion transistors, up to 128 GB of unified memory, and 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple announced the M2 at WWDC on June 6, 2022. Built on a refined N5P process, the M2 contained 20 billion transistors and raised the Neural Engine to 15.8 TOPS. The M2 Pro and M2 Max followed in January 2023, and on June 5, 2023 Apple announced the M2 Ultra alongside the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, completing the Intel-to-Apple-silicon transition for the Mac line. The M2 Ultra contained 134 billion transistors, supported up to 192 GB of unified memory, and provided 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
On October 30, 2023, Apple held its Scary Fast event to announce the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the first personal computer chips fabricated on TSMC's N3B (3 nm) process. The M3 family introduced hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing in the GPU and a feature Apple called Dynamic Caching. The M3 Max with a 16-core CPU offered 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth and supported up to 128 GB of unified memory. Apple announced the M3 Ultra on March 5, 2025, in a refreshed Mac Studio; it offered 32 CPU cores, an 80-core GPU, a 32-core Neural Engine, up to 512 GB of unified memory, and 819 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple introduced the M4 on May 7, 2024 inside the new iPad Pro, the first time an M-series chip debuted in an iPad rather than a Mac. The M4 is built on TSMC's N3E process, contains 28 billion transistors in the base configuration, and houses a 16-core Neural Engine rated at 38 TOPS. The M4 Pro and M4 Max followed on October 30, 2024 in updated MacBook Pro and Mac mini models. The M4 Max, with a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, supports up to 128 GB of unified memory at 546 GB/s.
The Apple A17 Pro, announced on September 12, 2023 in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, was the first 3 nm A-series chip. Built on TSMC's N3B process, it carries roughly 19 billion transistors and a 16-core Neural Engine rated at 35 TOPS, more than double the A16's 17 TOPS. The Apple A18 and A18 Pro launched on September 9, 2024 in the iPhone 16 lineup; both are built on a refined version of N3 and are the first iPhone chips designed from the start with Apple Intelligence features in mind. The A19 and A19 Pro launched in the iPhone 17 family on September 9, 2025, fabricated on TSMC's N3P process. The A19 Pro added Neural Accelerators to each GPU core, an architectural feature shared with the M5.
Apple announced the base Apple M5 on October 15, 2025 in a new 14-inch MacBook Pro, an updated iPad Pro, and a refreshed Vision Pro. Manufactured on TSMC's third-generation 3 nm process, the M5 features a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator integrated into each GPU core, which Apple cites as delivering up to 3.5 times the AI performance of the M4. The base M5 supports up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory at 153 GB/s, a roughly 30 percent increase over the M4.
A modern Apple silicon SoC is a single package containing the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and a large amount of supporting fixed-function hardware, with LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X DRAM packaged on the same substrate. Major architectural elements common to most Apple silicon chips include:
The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is the dedicated NPU block inside Apple silicon. Apple introduced it in the A11 Bionic on September 12, 2017. The ANE is exposed to applications through Core ML, which transparently splits inference workloads between the CPU, GPU, and ANE based on the model graph and the operations supported by each engine. Although Apple has not published a detailed architectural reference, the ANE is widely understood to be a tile-based matrix-multiply engine optimized for low-precision integer and FP16 inference rather than training.
The ANE has been used in production for Face ID matching, Apple Photos scene and face recognition, Live Text in Camera, on-device dictation and Siri request handling, real-time translation, and most recently for Apple Intelligence on-device models. The ANE has scaled in published peak throughput as follows.
| Chip | Year | ANE cores | Peak throughput |
|---|---|---|---|
| A11 Bionic | 2017 | 2 | 0.6 TOPS |
| A12 Bionic | 2018 | 8 | 5 TOPS |
| A13 Bionic | 2019 | 8 | 6 TOPS |
| A14 Bionic | 2020 | 16 | 11 TOPS |
| M1 | 2020 | 16 | 11 TOPS |
| A15 Bionic | 2021 | 16 | 15.8 TOPS |
| M2 | 2022 | 16 | 15.8 TOPS |
| A16 Bionic | 2022 | 16 | 17 TOPS |
| A17 Pro | 2023 | 16 | 35 TOPS |
| M3 | 2023 | 16 | 18 TOPS |
| A18 / A18 Pro | 2024 | 16 | 35 TOPS |
| M4 | 2024 | 16 | 38 TOPS |
With the M5 generation, Apple shifted some matrix-multiply workloads onto Neural Accelerators inside each GPU core, complementing the dedicated ANE.
Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC on June 10, 2024 as a system-level set of generative AI features for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The first features shipped on October 28, 2024 in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Hardware requirements were the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, the entire iPhone 16 family, any iPad with the A17 Pro or any M-series chip, and any Mac with an M-series chip.
Apple Intelligence runs in three tiers depending on the difficulty of the request:
The choice to anchor Apple Intelligence on the Neural Engine, GPU, and unified memory architecture is the reason older iPhone models without the A17 Pro and Macs with Intel processors are excluded from the feature set.
Apple maintains several developer-facing technologies that target Apple silicon for machine learning and AI workloads.
coremltools package. Core ML automatically partitions inference graphs across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.grad and vmap, uses lazy graph evaluation, and stores arrays in unified memory so that the same buffer can be operated on by the CPU or GPU without copies.mps device backend in PyTorch 1.12, released in May 2022, jointly developed with Apple's Metal team.| Chip | Announced | Process node | Max transistors | Max GPU cores | Max ANE TOPS | Max unified memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M1 | Nov 10, 2020 | TSMC N5 | 16 billion | 8 | 11 | 16 GB |
| M1 Pro | Oct 18, 2021 | TSMC N5 | 33.7 billion | 16 | 11 | 32 GB |
| M1 Max | Oct 18, 2021 | TSMC N5 | 57 billion | 32 | 11 | 64 GB |
| M1 Ultra | Mar 8, 2022 | TSMC N5 | 114 billion | 64 | 22 | 128 GB |
| M2 | Jun 6, 2022 | TSMC N5P | 20 billion | 10 | 15.8 | 24 GB |
| M2 Pro | Jan 17, 2023 | TSMC N5P | 40 billion | 19 | 15.8 | 32 GB |
| M2 Max | Jan 17, 2023 | TSMC N5P | 67 billion | 38 | 15.8 | 96 GB |
| M2 Ultra | Jun 5, 2023 | TSMC N5P | 134 billion | 76 | 31.6 | 192 GB |
| M3 | Oct 30, 2023 | TSMC N3B | 25 billion | 10 | 18 | 24 GB |
| M3 Pro | Oct 30, 2023 | TSMC N3B | 37 billion | 18 | 18 | 36 GB |
| M3 Max | Oct 30, 2023 | TSMC N3B | 92 billion | 40 | 18 | 128 GB |
| M3 Ultra | Mar 5, 2025 | TSMC N3B | 184 billion | 80 | 36 | 512 GB |
| M4 | May 7, 2024 | TSMC N3E | 28 billion | 10 | 38 | 32 GB |
| M4 Pro | Oct 30, 2024 | TSMC N3E | n/a | 20 | 38 | 64 GB |
| M4 Max | Oct 30, 2024 | TSMC N3E | n/a | 40 | 38 | 128 GB |
| M5 | Oct 15, 2025 | TSMC N3P | n/a | 10 | n/a | 32 GB |
Transistor counts marked as "n/a" were not published by Apple at announcement.
| Chip | Year | iPhone debut | Process node | Neural Engine TOPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A11 Bionic | 2017 | iPhone 8, X | TSMC 10 nm | 0.6 |
| A12 Bionic | 2018 | iPhone XS, XR | TSMC N7 | 5 |
| A13 Bionic | 2019 | iPhone 11 | TSMC N7P | 6 |
| A14 Bionic | 2020 | iPhone 12 | TSMC N5 | 11 |
| A15 Bionic | 2021 | iPhone 13 | TSMC N5P | 15.8 |
| A16 Bionic | 2022 | iPhone 14 Pro | TSMC N4P | 17 |
| A17 Pro | 2023 | iPhone 15 Pro | TSMC N3B | 35 |
| A18 / A18 Pro | 2024 | iPhone 16 family | TSMC N3E | 35 |
| A19 / A19 Pro | 2025 | iPhone 17 family | TSMC N3P | n/a |
Apple silicon laptops and desktops have consistently led mainstream client CPU benchmarks since 2020. Following the M1 launch, the Apple chip topped Geekbench 5 single-core scores for laptops by a significant margin while consuming roughly one-quarter of the power of competing Intel Tiger Lake parts. Each subsequent generation has held or extended that lead in single-core benchmarks. The high-end Pro and Max variants compete with workstation-class x86 parts in multithreaded workloads at substantially lower thermal and power budgets, while Ultra variants such as the M3 Ultra contend with discrete-GPU workstations in graphics and compute throughput.
The other consistently cited advantage is memory bandwidth. A modern x86 desktop typically offers between 50 and 100 GB/s of bandwidth from DDR5 memory, while the M3 Max delivers 400 GB/s, the M4 Max 546 GB/s, and the M3 Ultra 819 GB/s, all of it shared with the GPU and Neural Engine. For machine-learning inference, where memory bandwidth is the dominant bottleneck for large language model decoding, this gap allows M-series Macs to outperform much more expensive PC workstations on local LLM workloads.
Apple has been TSMC's lead customer for every major leading-edge node since N7 in 2018, typically locking up most of TSMC's first-year capacity for a new process. The Apple A12 Bionic was TSMC's first commercial 7 nm chip, the A14 was TSMC's first 5 nm chip, and the A17 Pro and the M3 family were the first commercial chips on TSMC's 3 nm N3B process. The M4 generation moved to N3E, a higher-yielding refinement of the 3 nm node, and the A19 and A19 Pro adopted N3P. Apple has also been reported as the lead customer for TSMC's upcoming 2 nm (N2) process. Apple's exclusive early access to each new node is widely cited as a structural performance and efficiency advantage versus competitors using older nodes.
| Family | Purpose | Notable chips |
|---|---|---|
| S-series | Apple Watch SiPs | S1 (2015) through S10 (Apple Watch Series 10, 2024) |
| T-series | Mac security and controller | T1 (2016), T2 (2017 to 2018) |
| H-series | AirPods audio | H1 (2019), H2 (AirPods Pro 2, 2022) |
| W-series | Wireless coprocessors | W1 (AirPods, 2016), W2 (Apple Watch Series 3), W3 (Apple Watch Series 4) |
| U-series | Ultra Wideband | U1 (iPhone 11, 2019), U2 (iPhone 15, 2023) |
| R-series | Mixed-reality sensor coprocessor | R1 (Apple Vision Pro, 2024) |
| C-series | Cellular modem | C1 (iPhone 16e, February 2025) |
The S10 in the Apple Watch Series 10, released September 20, 2024, is a SiP with a dual-core 64-bit processor, a 4-core Neural Engine, and 64 GB of storage. The R1 in the Apple Vision Pro processes input from 12 cameras, five sensors, and six microphones and reportedly delivers a 12-millisecond photon-to-photon latency. The C1 in the iPhone 16e, released in February 2025, is Apple's first cellular modem, supporting sub-6 GHz 5G but not millimeter-wave; it is the result of Apple's 2019 acquisition of Intel's modem business.
The November 2020 launch of the M1 was widely covered as a watershed event for the personal computer industry. AnandTech, NotebookCheck, and other technical reviewers reported that the chip matched or beat contemporary high-end Intel and AMD laptop CPUs on single-threaded performance while running silently in fanless designs, and that battery life on M1 MacBook Air units exceeded 15 hours of mixed use. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger publicly framed Apple silicon as competitive pressure during the company's 2021 product strategy refresh. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, announced in October 2023, was widely interpreted as the PC industry's answer to Apple silicon, and a 2024 collaboration between NVIDIA and MediaTek on a Windows-on-ARM chip was reported with similar framing.
Apple's vertical integration of chip design, operating system, compiler toolchain, and applications is frequently cited as the structural reason competitors have struggled to match the platform-level efficiency of Apple silicon. Tim Cook has described in-house silicon as one of Apple's most important strategic decisions, and lead designer Johny Srouji was promoted to Chief Hardware Officer in April 2026, formalizing the centrality of silicon to Apple's hardware roadmap.
For the AI ecosystem in particular, the unified memory architecture has shifted expectations of where local inference can run. The release of MLX in late 2023 and the rapid optimization of llama.cpp and other projects for Metal backends has made Apple silicon a preferred platform for individual developers and researchers running open-weight large language models on personal hardware, complementing rather than replacing data-center GPU clusters from NVIDIA.