Apple M-series Processors

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• Processor
• CPU

2022

Announcement of M2 processor for Mac devices

On June 7, 2022, it became known that Apple had officially announced its M2 chipset. The introduction of the M2 chip marks the debut of the second generation Apple Silicon processors.

Source: apple.com

As the name itself suggests, the Apple M2 is the successor to the M1 chipset, announced a couple of months ago, and promises to improve performance.

Apple's M2 chip uses Apple's special ARM silicon and is built using a 5nm process with 20 billion transistors, which the company says is 25 percent more than the original M1 processor.

Source: apple.com

The company also promises an 18% faster processor and 35% faster GPU compared to the M1. Apple also says performance is about 1.9 times that of the "last 10-core laptop processor," but doesn't directly name competitors.

Source: apple.com

Apple also uses performance and efficiency cores in M2. There are four performance cores, of which four are efficient cores on M2, with a total cache of 16 MB on performance cores and a total cache of 4 MB on efficiency cores.

As for the GPU, it has up to 10 cores, two more than the original M1. It also improves graphics performance by increasing cache and memory bandwidth. Apple promises up to 35% better performance than its predecessor.

It also has 100Gb/s memory bandwidth and 24GB of combined memory, 50% more than its predecessor. The chip also features a secure next-generation enclave and a neural engine. It also has an updated media engine that supports 8K H.264 and HEVC video. This means it will be able to play multiple 4K and 8K video streams at the same time ^[1].

Discovery of a vulnerability in Apple M1 and A14 processors

On May 3, 2022, it became known that experts had discovered another vulnerability processors Apple one in M1 and A14. The lack of Augury Apple Silicon microarchitecture is not critical and leads data breach to rest.

Illustration: apple.com

A team of researchers led by Jose Rodrigo Sanchez Vicarte of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Michael Flanders of the University of Washington published a report on a discovered error in Augury Apple Silicon.

The Apple processor uses a Data-Memory data Dependent Prefetcher (DMP) mechanism Algorithm. scans the contents of the memory and determines whether to make a prefetch.

The Apple M1, M1 Max and A14 processors pre-fetch using a pointer array exchange pattern. The process could lead to a data breach, experts said. The Apple M1 Pro and possibly older A-series chips also contain the vulnerability.

"As soon as the chip sees that an array of * arr [0]... * arr [2] is happening, the processor will begin pre-sampling * arr [3] and beyond. That is, first first select the arr content, and then exchange this content. Moreover, the usual prefetch mechanism will not perform the exchange, "- researchers said.

"The error found is a sufficiently weak DMP mechanism for an attacker. It prefetches only when the content is a valid virtual address and has a number of odd constraints. We show that this can be used to leak data and disrupt address space layout randomization (ASLR). We believe that other larger attacks are possible, "- stated associate professor Washington university and principal investigator of the group David Kolbrenner.

The vulnerability under investigation is not critical or dangerous for exploits to penetrate. Leakage can only come from pointers and possibly from the sandbox. Despite the low danger of error, it is important enough and will allow Apple to make its devices more protected from malicious use.

Since Apple's move to its own processors, there have been several small security issues related to the exchange of data between applications. In addition, a special malware for Apple Silicon was previously created.^[2]

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