Yesterday, I posted an article positing that WeWork’s CEO might just be indirectly and accidentally responsible for drastically changing the processor industry:
What if WeWork’s jamoke CEO accidentally changed the processor industry?
The article got a record number of pageviews, and I got a number of emails and direct messages asking all sorts of questions about Arm chips, from “What makes Arm processors so different?” to “Has anyone seen an Arm-based Mac in action yet?”
Here are some videos that should provide lots of background material to better help you understand Arm chips and Apple’s move to their own custom silicon.
Let’s start with this CNET supercut of the parts of the WWDC keynote where Tim Cook and company talk about Apple’s transition from Intel chips to their own Arm-based ones:
This is Max Tech’s best guess as to what the Arm-based Mac release timeline will look like:
Many people have a take on what Apple’s move to Arm means. Here are CNET’s top 5 guesses:
Here’s a video from a year ago that asks “Is Intel in trouble? Is ARM the future?”. It’s worth watching for its history lesson about Arm:
Here’s a really quick (under 6 minutes) look at Arm CPUs:
Here’s a more hardcore explanation of how CPUs (in general) work:
CPUs used to be stand-alone things, but we’ve been migrating to SOCs (systems on a chip) for some time. Here’s an explainer:
This Gary Explains video explains the differences between Arm’s and Intel’s architectures:
Here’s a reminder from Computerphile that Arm design chips — they don’t make them. There’s a difference:
Here’s a treat: an unboxing of Apple’s “developer transition kit”, which registered Apple developers can apply to try out to test their apps on Apple silicon. It’s a Mac Mini powered by an Apple A12z chip, which is the same processor that drives the iPad Pro.
