Apple silicon
Apple silicon is Apple's family of custom-designed chips, including the M series used in Macs and other devices and the A series for iPhones and iPads.
Apple silicon is a family of systems on a chip designed in-house by Apple. It includes the A series for iPhones and iPads, which began with the A4 in 2010, and the M series, which debuted with the M1 in 2020 and powers Macs among other devices. Starting in 2020, Apple moved the Mac from Intel processors to Apple silicon. Each generation of the M series comes in a base chip and higher tiers such as Pro, Max and Ultra.
M-series chips combine components such as the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine on a single chip, all sharing unified memory. As a result, local AI models on a Mac run from that unified memory rather than from the dedicated VRAM of a discrete graphics card. Models converted for MLX, Apple's machine-learning framework, are used to make the most of Apple silicon's memory bandwidth and accelerators.
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…sing hardware, check its fast memory: VRAM, or graphics-card memory, on a dedicated GPU; or unified memory, the shared memory available to an Apple Silicon Mac.
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