Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V

The M1 is the beginning of a paradigm shift, which will benefit RISC-V microprocessors, but not the way you think.

By now it is pretty clear that Apple’s M1 chip is a big deal. And the implications for the rest of the industry is gradually becoming clearer. In this story I want to talk about a connection to RISC-V microprocessors which may not be obvious to most readers.

Let me me give you some background first: Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?

In that story I talked about two factors driving M1 performance. One was the use of massive number of decoders and Out-of-Order Execution (OoOE). Don’t worry it that sounds like technological gobbledegook to you.

This story will be all about the other part: Heterogenous computing. Apple is aggressively pursued a strategy of adding specialized hardware units, I will refer to as coprocessors throughout this article:

• GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) for graphics and many other tasks with a lot of data parallelism (do the same operation on many elements at the same time).
• Neural Engine. Specialized hardware for doing machine learning.
• Digital Signal processing hardware for image processing.