As promised, Apple released the first Silicon Macs in November 2020. So it was not a complete surprise when Apple announced at their developer conference in 2020 that they would be moving the entire Mac product line to their own CPUs over the next two years. After so many iterations, it became clear to technology observers that Apple’s CPUs, especially in the iPad Pro, had become performance-competitive with low-power Intel laptop CPUs. Apple has been a CPU designer for nearly a decade (since releasing the iPhone 5 in 2012), but until the end of 2020, their CPUs were only used in mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. In short, Apple is transitioning their entire laptop and desktop computer lineup from using Intel CPUs to using CPUs of Apple’s own design.
In this post, I'll break down what Apple Silicon means for Python users today, especially those doing scientific computing and data science: what works, what doesn't, and where this might be going.
As a result, much has been written in the technology press about what the transition means for Mac users, but seldom from a Python data scientist's perspective. Even if you are not a Mac user, you have likely heard Apple is switching from Intel CPUs to their own custom CPUs, which they refer to collectively as "Apple Silicon." The last time Apple changed its computer architecture this dramatically was 15 years ago when they switched from PowerPC to Intel CPUs.
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