Bloomberg: Apple’s first ARM soc for Macs has 12 cores

Apple’s first Mac with an ARM processor will reportedly get a soc that is made at 5nm and contains twelve cores. It concerns eight powerful cores and four economical cores. It is not yet clear whether it is a MacBook or iMac, but a laptop is the obvious choice.

Bloomberg provides the first technical details of the ARM soc that Apple would use in a Mac. According to the financial news agency, which is known for its good sources within Apple, it is a soc based on the design of the upcoming A14 soc for iPhones, but with more cores. The soc would get eight powerful Firestorm cores, supplemented by four economical Icestorm cores. The soc is also equipped with a gpu, but details about this are not yet known.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the soc is “much faster” than iPhones and iPads. It is obvious that the soc for PCs not only has more cores, but also achieves higher clock speeds, because the energy consumption can be higher than with passively cooled smartphones and tablets. Apple uses a maximum of four powerful cores and four economical cores in its current iPad socs. With iPhones, it’s two and four.

It is not yet clear in which device Apple will put the ARM soc. According to Bloomberg, at least one Mac will come with the new soc next year. That could be both an iMac and a MacBook. It is likely that it is a MacBook, because ARM-socs are economical and the configuration with fast and economical cores also seems to indicate a laptop processor. Reportedly, TSMC will make the chip on a 5nm process.

According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on multiple socs under the code name Kalamata and variants with more cores are being considered. Apple is said to plan to design a new soc for Macs every year, just as it does now with socs for iPhones. The development of socs for iPhones and Macs would then run parallel. Apple has been using Intel processors for its Macs since 2005. By making its own chips, Apple is no longer dependent on the developments at Intel.