Recently KFC announced that they were out of potatoes and boy did they plunge the country into a chip-uh-lease crisis! Total chaos that lasted for days’ people, it got me thinking, aren’t potatoes farmed here in Kinangop? Because the last time I was in Kinangop, we sat down in a small roadside eatery and ordered 1kg of meat, between my colleagues and me. We are so Kenyanese that when they asked us what else to add to the wet fry, we said viazi ya 20 bob. Let me tell you Maina, the 20 bob potatoes could have fed the 5000 men that Jesus fed, they were that many. How then were there no potatoes at KFC for our chips? How many other things are locally farmed yet are imported? We import onions, fish, eggs, chicken, cereals. The Netherlands, almost the size of Kitui County (30, 430km²) feeds the world from reclaimed land. Their food export bill alone, $108B, was higher than Kenya’s $99 total GDP for the year 2020.

Back to chips! Not the KFC chips John, the M1, Intel & AMD semiconductor processing chips.

For 14 years, Apple used Intel’s Processors for their devices. However, in the year 2020, they announced that they were going to include a new M1 chip in the MacBook Air, the 13’ MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini. The M1 chip is basically an Arm architecture-based chip as compared to the x86 architecture chip that Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and Intel chip use. Apple has been using the Arm-architecture chips for years now in their iPhones. They simply modify them to enhance their overall performance.

The M1 is composed of an 8-core processor, 4 performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores that are only used during peak performance. The most unique thing about the M1 is the cutting-edge Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) 5 nm (nanometer) process for creating transistors, which is superior to both AMD’s 7 nm process and Intel’s 10 nm manufacturing process.

Recently, Intel has been firing at M1 chip citing benchmark tests. Last year in January, that is 2021, the website Tom’s Hardware published slides from a recent Intel presentation that put the M1 up against Intel’s chips in an assortment of tasks including photo enhancement, album organization, stock options picking, and online homework. This has been assumed to be due to the pressure that the M1 chip has yielded since inception.

As much as the M1 chip is doing great and all, Intel’s new Core i7 processor has been improved tremendously and it has a higher benchmark score than the old Intel chip, it might even be better than the M1 Max processor chip in some tests.

In the chip world, you either go big or go home, and clearly, Intel’s Core i7 processor didn’t come to play.

From www.medium.com: APPLE, Intel and AMD are racing to deliver generation after generation of powerful, energy-efficient processors for laptop and desktop computers. The result, ultra-portable laptops that run for days on a single charge and will also give entry-level PCs the ability to process workloads that were previously the sole domain of workstation-level computers.

Depending on your use case, na mfuko, all options work. Let’s talk chips.