[Tech] What's inside a System-on-a-Chip(SoC)?_Apple M1

Q) What is a SoC?
A) A system on a chip, also known as an SoC, is essentially an integrated circuit or an IC that takes a single platform and integrates an entire electronic or computer system onto it. It is, exactly as its name suggests, an entire system on a single chip. The components that an SoC generally looks to incorporate within itself include a central processing unit, input and output ports, internal memory, as well as analog input and output blocks among other things. Depending on the kind of system that has been reduced to the size of a chip, it can perform a variety of functions including signal processing, wireless communication, artificial intelligence and more

-->from anysilicon.com

M1
Apple's brand-new m1 chip is an ARM-based chipset. This System-on-a-Chip is on the Macbook Air, Macbook pro, iMac, and the iPad pro. This chipset is supplied by the Taiwanese firm TSMC, the leading Foundry firm in the world. M1 is made using the 5nm process.

FIY, 5nm process means the line width of the circuits inside the semiconductor is 5nm wide. It is not easy to think of how thin it is. nanometer in meters is 10 to the power of -9. Never could I imagine how thin it is! Producing circuit of that width is just simply insane.

M1 chip is well known for its fast speed and high efficiency. With massive 16billion transistors, the chipset shows amazing performances. It features 8-core CPU, including 4 High-performance cores, and 4 High-efficiency cores that contribute to the excellent speed performance it shows while using up less power. Though the comparison graph that Apple provided (performance by power consumption graph in Apple Event in November) is a bit strange since the comparison isn't clearly identified and the numbers aren't labeled in the graph's axes, it is evident that this chipset is a stands out in its performance among all the other chips in the market.

strange graph, isn't it?

8-core GPU is a great addition to this chip providing users with world's fastest integrated graphics while using only 1/3 of the power compared to other chipsets.
16-core Neural Engine in the M1 makes their devices excel at tasks like voice recognition, video analysis, and image processing to the level never shown in their previous devices or other chipsets.

Many reviews prove that this chip performs at a level never seen before and no other one matches its high caliber quality. I am seriously looking forward to use Apple's product featuring a M1 chip and check it out myself. I have heard that Geekbench is a program where you can measure the performance of the CPU by converting the performances into scores. I am looking forward to learning about that program in the upcoming days, but since I have so little information about that I will cover about the topic in later posts.

The fact that Neural Engines even exist in a SoC was new to me. I was always curious how the AI and machine learning thing plus AI assistants like Siri worked in such a small device. It was all thanks to the NPUs inside the chip. They were also the ones that are crucial to the cutting-edge technologies that are featured these days such as searching by voice, image correction, and Google photo search. Without this Engines, we wouldn't be able to enjoy the amazing and both making-life-easier features. In accord with this, a new feature that Apple put in iOS15 came up on my mind. In WWDC 2021, Apple announced that searching by photos and converting the letters&numbers in the photos to texts will be possible. This feature is probably the result of NPUs in work.

By exploring what's inside a SoC through the market's latest product M1 chip was a thrilling experience for me. Prior to this research, I had no idea how an electronic device, especially a phone operates, and didn't even know the necessity of a chipset or a semiconductor. But watching the whole Apple Event and by wandering around tons and tons of analysis of the chip, I now got a grasp about the crucialness of this little friend. Just like the brain makes our whole body move and think and do everything that we intend to, this chip does exactly what a brain does to our body.

I am hoping to learn more about other System-on-Chips made by many other companies. I can name a few such as Samsung's Exynos, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon. Every one of them has a similar structure in that they all contain CPUs, GPUS, NPUs, and DRAMS. But their performance differs in a wide range depending on what company manufactures them and what is specifically included in them. Sounds like lots of extra studying to do for me! ;)

a tech insight by taeyounkim