Apple silicon

Apple Silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture. They are used in nearly all of the company's devices including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTag, HomePod, and Apple Vision Pro.

The first Apple-designed system-on-a-chip was the Apple A4, which was introduced in 2010 with the first-generation iPad and later used in the iPhone 4, fourth generation iPod Touch and second generation Apple TV.

Apple announced its plan to switch Mac computers from Intel processors to its own chips at WWDC 2020 on June 22, 2020, and began referring to its chips as Apple silicon. The first Macs with Apple silicon, built with the Apple M1 chip, were unveiled on November 10, 2020. The Mac lineup completed its transition to Apple chips in June 2023.

Apple fully controls the integration of Apple silicon in the company's hardware and software products. Johny Srouji, the senior vice president for Apple's hardware technologies, is in charge of the silicon design. Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.

The A series is a family of SoCs used in the iPhone, certain iPad models (including iPad Mini and entry-level iPad), and the Apple TV. A-series chips were also used in the discontinued iPod Touch line and the original HomePod. They integrate one or more ARM-based processing cores (CPU), a graphics processing unit (GPU), cache memory and other electronics necessary to provide mobile computing functions within a single physical package.

The Apple A4 is a PoP SoC manufactured by Samsung, the first SoC Apple designed in-house. It combines an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU – also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC – and a PowerVR SGX 535 graphics processor (GPU), all built on Samsung's 45-nanometer silicon chip fabrication process. The design emphasizes power efficiency. The A4 commercially debuted in 2010, in Apple's iPad tablet, and was later used in the iPhone 4 smartphone, the fourth-generation iPod Touch, and the 2nd-generation Apple TV.

The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4, dubbed Hummingbird, is thought to use performance improvements developed by Samsung in collaboration with chip designer Intrinsity, which was subsequently acquired by Apple It can run at far higher clock rates than other Cortex-A8 designs yet remains fully compatible with the design provided by ARM. The A4 runs at different speeds in different products: 1 GHz in the first iPads and 2nd-generation Apple TV, and 800 MHz in the iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod Touch.

The A4's SGX535 GPU could theoretically push 35 million polygons per second and 500 million pixels per second, although real-world performance may be considerably less. Other performance improvements include additional L2 cache.