The interrupt controller is now Apple Interrupt Controller 2, breaking with many years of backwards compatibility with iPhone SoCs that used AIC1. While keeping the core components the same (M1 Pro/Max have many of the same components as M1, including the same CPU cores), they broke backwards compatibility in two critical areas where the M1 ran into limitations: the interrupt controller, and the physical address space size (which required changing the IOMMUs).
With the M1 Pro/Max (codename “Jade”, SoC names T6000/T6001), Apple iterated on the M1 architecture in order to prepare for scaling it up in future chips. This means certain design elements of the A14 date back to much older iPhone chips, from an era where 16GB of RAM or more than 16 cores seemed completely ludicrous for mobile devices. This isn’t due to a lack of foresight by Apple, but rather because they strive to keep backwards compatibility with older SoCs as much as possible. While this worked well for the machine classes the M1 shipped in, the A14 class was running into limitations scaling up to larger SoCs. In order to build a Mac-worthy chip, Apple added some critical features (like Thunderbolt support), but otherwise left the old iPhone-centric architecture largely intact. The original M1 (codename “Tonga”, SoC name T8103) would have more properly been called the A14X following Apple’s existing naming convention it is, in fact, the tablet version of the A14 iPhone SoC (T8101). It’s interesting to take a peek at what Apple have done with the new chips. We got right to work on supporting these new machines, and after just a few days of work we were able to bring up Asahi Linux on them up to feature parity with the M1 machines! Going forward, we’ll be supporting these machines as well as the previous generation. Whoops, things got so busy we ended up skipping a month! A lot has been going on in kernel land over the past couple of months, so we hope you enjoy this combined October-November progress report! M1 Pro/Max joins the familyĪt the end of October, Apple launched the next generation of Apple Silicon: M1 Pro and M1 Max.
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