Apple has announced the in-house designed processor for its new Apple Macs.

Apple launches proprietary processor for Macs, M1

Called M1, it will be used in the MacBook air, MacBook mini, and MacBook pro.

It is built using Arm cores, fabbed on TSMC’s 5nm process and has 16 billion transistors.

Arm claims  it will offer longer battery life than Macs have had in the past – for instance a  MacBook air using M1 will play 18 hours of video on one charge compared to 12 hours with the previously used Intel processor.

Apple says that the M1 has four fast cores and four high-efficiency cores. It also has a 16 core neural engine, a universal memory architecture, a proprietary Thunderbolt controller with support for USB 4, an image signal processor, and encode and decode engines.

Rosetta 2 translation software is being offered for apps which are not optimised for the new processor, while iOS and IPadOS apps will run natively.