☕ Apple M1 chip crushes Intel
Bitcoin reaches a new all time high. The benchmarks are out on Apple's new M1 chip. There are impressive performance gains and massive gains in battery life.
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Tech Dive
No tech dive for today unfortunately! Here’s the schedule for future tech dives
Thursday - Serverless Applications
Stay tuned!
Interview Question
You are given an array as input. The elements in the array are all integers.
A peak element is an element that is greater than its neighbors.
Find a peak element in the array and return it’s index.
You can assume that the left and right borders of the array represent negative infinity.
Example
Input - [1,2,1,3,5,6,4]
Output - 1 or 5
Here’s the question in LeetCode!
We’ll send the solution tomorrow!
Industry News
Apple’s new M1 Macbooks have very impressive results
Apple recently announced that they were transitioning the Macbook Air and Pro to ARM-based M1 chips developed by Apple. Previously, these computers used Intel CPUs ( Intel i5 and i7s).
Now, these new Macbooks have finally started shipping and we’re finally seeing real stats. The Firestorm cores clock in at 3.2 ghz, which is a 6% improvement over the 3 ghz frequency of Apple’s A14 chip.
This has resulted in the new M1 Macs being extremely fast performance-wise. Additionally, Apple’s “Rosetta 2” emulator (translates instructions written for Intel processors into M1 instructions) works very well with emulated Apps running faster on the M1 Macbooks compared to previous Macs.
Battery life has also been fantastic with massive improvements over previous generations. The M1 Macbook Air can run for more than 16 hours on various battery benchmarks, which is 5 hours more than the last Intel-based Macbook Air.
The downsides of the laptops is that the webcams are still terrible (only 720p) and Apple’s feature of running iOS apps on MacOS is still very buggy. Overall though, very impressive!
Bitcoin Market Cap reaches a new all-time high, breaking December 2017 record
The market cap of the Bitcoin network has now reached $329.91 billion dollars, exceeding the December 2017 high of $328.89 billion as the price of Bitcoin has now hit $17,800 dollars per BTC. The market cap of the network is calculated by multiplying the price * number of BTC.
The current price of Bitcoin is still a bit lower than the December 2017 high of $19,650 but the market cap is higher now because there are more Bitcoins in the network. New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes as part of a fee to incentivize miners to continue confirming Bitcoin transactions. Currently, 6.25 Bitcoin are created on every block as a reward to the miner who mined the block. This reward halves every four years in a process known as “the halving”.
The last “halving” was in May of 2020 and these events are typically followed by massive spikes in the price of Bitcoin due to the lower produced supply. The halving in May could be part of the reason we’re seeing the massive bull run in BTC right now.
You can read more about how Bitcoin Mining works here.
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Arpan