Whats common between the A14 and M1?

[MacBH928]

So Apple says both iPad and M1 are 5nm and they are both ARM but obviously here the M1 Macs are so much more powerful(I think?) than the A14s in iPads and iPhone. Is there something both common in them or are they totally different chips? A lot of people thought Apple would put an upgraded iPad Pro chip in the Macbook and call it a day.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Some people would say the M1 is an upgraded A14 chip. Most of the technical teardowns describe the basic architecture as the same.

My guess is that Apple has used A-series chips as M-series prototypes for years.

Note that the DTK device used an A-series chip and the M1 Mac mini has a similar M1 chip.

Those who thought that Apple would simply stick the A14 in the Mac and call it a day were idiots. There are plenty of those on the Internet and no one with a modicum of sense thought it would be the case.

Note that at WWDC in June, Apple specifically said that these would be a family of different but related chips. It's not like Apple fired up the copy machine. They could have done that years ago if they wanted to.

 

[littlepud]

So Apple says both iPad and M1 are 5nm and they are both ARM but obviously here the M1 Macs are so much more powerful(I think?) than the A14s in iPads and iPhone. Is there something both common in them or are they totally different chips? A lot of people thought Apple would put an upgraded iPad Pro chip in the Macbook and call it a day.

A14 and M1 most likely share the same underlying CPU and GPU cores, but I would expect the "system" parts of the SoC to be different.

 

[Mr.Blacky]

(https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ewing-apple-about-its-mac-silicon-revolution/):

Not exactly so, said Federighi:

The M1 is essentially a superset, if you want to think of it relative to A14. Because as we set out to build a Mac chip, there were many differences from what we otherwise would have had in a corresponding, say, A14X or something.
We had done lots of analysis of Mac application workloads, the kinds of graphic/GPU capabilities that were required to run a typical Mac workload, the kinds of texture formats that were required, support for different kinds of GPU compute and things that were available on the Mac… just even the number of cores, the ability to drive Mac-sized displays, support for virtualization and Thunderbolt.
There are many, many capabilities we engineered into M1 that were requirements for the Mac, but those are all superset capabilities relative to what an app that was compiled for the iPhone would expect.

Srouji expanded on the point:

The foundation of many of the IPs that we have built and that became foundations for M1 to go build on top of it… started over a decade ago. As you may know, we started with our own CPU, then graphics and ISP and Neural Engine.
So we've been building these great technologies over a decade, and then several years back, we said, "Now it's time to use what we call the scalable architecture." Because we had the foundation of these great IPs, and the architecture is scalable with UMA.
Then we said, "Now it's time to go build a custom chip for the Mac," which is M1. It's not like some iPhone chip that is on steroids. It's a whole different custom chip, but we do use the foundation of many of these great IPs.

 

[hawkeye_a]

I suspect the clock frequency, amount of RAM, number of cores, etc.... might be different? (Can anyone verify?)

 

[UBS28]

The M1 is the A14X / A14Z that would have ended up in the iPad Pro.

The current iPad Pro (A12Z also has 4 small cores, 4 large core and a 8 core GPU in it).