November 10, 2020, Apple announced the first Apple-designed ARM based processor.

In fact, it's not a processor but complex System-on-Chip (SoC) System-in-Package(SiP), that includes HBM, CPU, GPU and Neural Engine. Let's have a bit closer loot at it.

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CPU

Apple M1 8 cores CPU includes 4 high-performance cores called "Firestorm" and 4 low-power cores called "Icestorm". Both are based on ARM v8.6A Instruction Set (Architecture). This ISA includes

• Brain Floating Point BFloat16, the same as used in TPU. It's 16bit floating point number, with extended bits for exponent. I.e. it a wide range and low precision floating point format.
• Instructions for efficient Matrix Multiplication, reducing memory usage, the key bottleneck for today
• Improved virtualization support

Read more about ARMv8.6A

Apple M1 CPU is fabricated on TSMCs N5 EUV process - 5nm. But Samsung may take-over Apple M1 production from TSMC.

From Twitter

HBM

High bandwidth memory (HBM) avoids the traditional CPU socket-memory channel design by pooling memory connected to a processor via an interposer layer. HBM combines memory chips and gives them closer and faster access to the CPU as the distance to the processor is only a few micrometer units. This on its own speeds data transfers.