Apple Silicon Under the Hood: ARM64e, Rosetta 2, and the Boot Chain

In 2020 Apple replaced the Mac's Intel processors with its own silicon, and in doing so rebuilt every layer of the platform — from the immutable Boot ROM in the chip to the ARM64e instruction set that userland code compiles against. This book takes you through all of it.

It begins with the SoC itself: performance and efficiency cores, GPU, Neural Engine, AMX matrix coprocessor, and the unified memo...