About Apple Silicon
Apple silicon is the family of processors that Apple designs in-house for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Vision Pro. Most are systems on a chip, meaning the processor, graphics, memory controllers and neural engine sit on one piece of silicon, and most are built on the Arm instruction set. Apple does not manufacture them and relies on contract foundries, mainly TSMC. The Mac moved to its own chips from the M1, shown in November 2020, and the Mac range completed that move in June 2023. Apple is based in Cupertino, California.
Apple Silicon was founded in 2020 and is based in Cupertino, CA, United States. It is listed under Custom Silicon, AI Accelerators, CPUs & RISC-V.
Compute Technologies
- Custom Silicon
- AI Accelerators
What Apple Silicon works on
Custom Silicon
Custom silicon means a company designs its own chips for its own products or data centers instead of buying standard parts. The chip is made by a foundry such as TSMC, but the design belongs to the customer.
AI Accelerators
An AI accelerator is a chip, or a part of a chip, designed to run machine learning faster or with less energy than a general-purpose processor. The category includes GPUs, TPUs, neural processing units (NPUs) and chips from many startups.
CPUs & RISC-V
A CPU, or central processing unit, is the general-purpose chip that runs a computer. It reads instructions, does arithmetic and logic, and decides what happens next. Every phone, laptop and server has at least one.
