American ingenuity has been the force behind some fantastic technologies. In 1958, Gordon Moore and his team at Fairchild Semiconductor manufactured silicon-based transistors and sold them to IBM for use in a Department of Defense computer system. The DoD’s need for these tiny devices quite literally spawned the technological epicenter we know today as Silicon Valley. Much of the cool tech we use today, from the iPhone® to WebEx and beyond, can trace its origin back to the government’s purchase order for Silicon transistors. Thank you, American ingenuity!
On November 10th, 2020, Apple announced a significant breakthrough in performance, custom technologies, and power efficiency in their M1 single system on a chip processor.
Agencies that use Mac® today will be doing more than just upgrading their systems. Agencies that migrate to M1 chips will give their best and brightest 16 billion transistors per chip to accomplish their respective missions. In the real world, this translates into some fantastic advantages over the previous generations of Mac, including:
- MacBook® batteries that last up to 20 hours.
- Machine Learning processing at 11 trillion operations per second, a 15x increase over previous generations.
- Automatic encryption for all files.
- Only Apple-signed code can run on the device, thanks to hardware verified secure boot, much like iPhone.
- Backward compatibility with existing applications and improved performance on some graphics-intensive applications due to Rosetta® 2 and Metal®.
- iOS apps that run on your phone or iPad® will also run on Mac – enabling unique workflows.
- Excellent video call quality due to the same image signal processor Apple uses in the iPhone®
Of course, agencies will have questions and GovSmart is here to help provide answers! A few common questions are:
- How to migrate my content from my current Mac?
- What is a single chip on a processor?
- What is unified memory?
- Will macOS® Big Sur look different?
- Will there be support for Thunderbolt 3 or USB 4?
- Will Microsoft Office work native on the M1 chip?
- How about the Adobe suite?
- How many iPhone and iPad apps are available to run on M1?
- How much memory can I get? Is the limit 16GB?
Reach out to [email protected] today to start a conversation about Apple’s magnificent breakthrough and how your agency can benefit from this auspicious advancement.
