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> Hands up who knows which company designed the iPhone 6s’ 64-bit chip Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custo

> Hands up who knows which company designed the iPhone 6s’ 64-bit chip Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 > Furber and his co-designer, Sophie Wilson, had found research from the Berkeley campus of the University of California into a new type of processor: one that simplified the set of instructions it would follow, in order to enable a sleeker, more efficient design. This style of processing was called “reduced instruction set computing”, or Risc, and the Berkeley Risc designs had been put together by just two people, David Patterson and Carlo Sequin. ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. > By 2007, Intel had abandoned the excesses of the company’s Pentium line Pentium is a brand name, which still exists today. What the author is referring to is Intel's "NetBurst" architecture. > powering the servers at companies like PayPal. Citation needed. The CEO of X-Gene said PayPal has “has deployed and validated” services based on their CPU, but readily admits to having shipped only 10,000 units, which is just peanuts to datacentre guys. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_2015_results/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_201... Overall, I'm happy for ARM's continued success, and I hope that they and the rest of the semiconductor industry will continue to innovate and bring the performance per watt up. That being said, this Guardian article is crap. It's factually incorrect in places, missing sources for claims, and generally doesn't do anything to actually explain why people supposedly don't know who ARM is. tl;dr - Some guys in Cambridge, who are fab-less, made a CPU from a RISC design. They license the designs to partners who can add whatever they want around the CPU (or redesign the CPU as long as they conform to the instruction set, as Apple does). The reason they're "not well known" is because they don't sell CPUs themselves, companies like Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc do.

sohcahtoa 11y ago
> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.
- tacos 11y ago
  Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-why-how-who/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous. "the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors." Do your damn research, people :-)
    - daemin 11y ago
      Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.
      - prodmerc 11y ago
        I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?
        daemin 11y ago
        Based on what another commented has said it seems Intel bought the ARM license from DEC, and given that they sold off only the consumer ARM chips - keeping the task specific ones - it makes sense in a way. It was so they wouldn't have any internal competition or divided focus away from their low power x86 chips - the Atom's.
- 11y ago
effie 11y ago
Thanks, you should write this to the author of that article.
Zigurd 11y ago
There is also an interesting story of the way they were propelled to success, pre-smartphone. I think it went something like Apple needed a chip for the Newton. That begat ARM as an Acorn spin-off. Then Nokia picked it up for GSM phones that needed a proper CPU. Nokia would have been enough to take ARM to a billion unit per year before iPhone. Apple has strict power requirements, and Nokia provided continued focus on power management. Is that about right?
- scholia 11y ago
  > I think it went something like Apple needed a chip for the Newton. That begat ARM as an Acorn spin-off. That's correct: the spin-off from Acorn was part of the deal with Apple (done by John Sculley). However, ARM had three investors: Acorn, Apple and chip company VLSI Technology Inc (VTI).
tw04 11y ago
I'm more interested to see what Amazon ends up doing with annapura (sp?) labs.
- newman314 11y ago
  It wasn't clear if Annapurna was still going to make chips available to other companies. Their premise certainly is very interesting and it would be a bummer to be just Amazon specific
potrebitel22 11y ago
>pple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA Citation needed. Different from Anand's mentioning of "custom designed implementation of ARM ISA" on his webpage without any proof and further copied and taken to Wikipedia. One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. Of course the chip is a custom design ( as it mentioned @ Wikipedia ), because ARM generally do not provide the peripherals and you can "bolt" whatever you like. Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves. The wild rumor goes to their attempt to ditch BRCM for wifi's chips for ages, something that would have happened if they had the resources to design something themselves. Not to mention the huge chunk of chip on the new macbook 12", rumored to be from the acquisition of Anobit, which if you have some knowledge of design is at least 4 generations behind. That of course is a speculation, much like Anand's quote of "custom ISA implementation" from A8 and onward, but at least the nm process can be seen to be quite old.
- newman314 11y ago
  Apple did buy PA Semi so they do have some chops there.
- kogepathic 11y ago
  > Citation needed. > One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. I don't work for Apple, and if I did I would value my job more over satisfying your need for a citation. But anyway, since I cannot prove or disprove that Apple did design their own chip, which they did, I will point out that NVidia, a much smaller company, has managed to do just what I claimed, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver > Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves. Really? I think their purchase of a processor design company in 2008 speaks to the fact that they do have this talent in house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi PA Semi designed their own POWER CPU, which they developed from scratch. Don't tell me these people (who work for Apple now) don't have the capabilities and resources to design a processor which can implement the ARM ISA. Either provide a citation that proves that Apple hasn't designed their own core implementing the ARM ISA, or stop demanding some from my claim, which has a lot more evidence behind it. The fact that they have dual sourced CPUs from TSMC and Samsung, which are on different processor nodes, thus requiring a different layout and mask, tells me that Apple's hardware engineers absolutely know what they're doing, and can design the internals of a chip: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i... Plus, around the time of the PA Semi acquisition, news outlets reported that the engineers were working on a custom CPU for Apple devices: http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_working_on_arm_chip_for_next_gen_iphone http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_wor... I honestly don't know why I put so much time into refuting this. Many other people on the internet think that Apple is designing their own core inside the iPhone, how else would a dual core chip smoking the living shit out of Samsung and Qualcomm's quad and octo core processors? Here, have another person who says Apple design it themselves. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=50614391 http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=506143...

sohcahtoa 11y ago

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

tacos 11y ago
Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-why-how-who/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous. "the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors." Do your damn research, people :-)
  - daemin 11y ago
    Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.
    - prodmerc 11y ago
      I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?
      - daemin 11y ago
        Based on what another commented has said it seems Intel bought the ARM license from DEC, and given that they sold off only the consumer ARM chips - keeping the task specific ones - it makes sense in a way. It was so they wouldn't have any internal competition or divided focus away from their low power x86 chips - the Atom's.
11y ago

effie 11y ago

Thanks, you should write this to the author of that article.

Zigurd 11y ago

There is also an interesting story of the way they were propelled to success, pre-smartphone. I think it went something like Apple needed a chip for the Newton. That begat ARM as an Acorn spin-off. Then Nokia picked it up for GSM phones that needed a proper CPU. Nokia would have been enough to take ARM to a billion unit per year before iPhone. Apple has strict power requirements, and Nokia provided continued focus on power management. Is that about right?

scholia 11y ago
> I think it went something like Apple needed a chip for the Newton. That begat ARM as an Acorn spin-off. That's correct: the spin-off from Acorn was part of the deal with Apple (done by John Sculley). However, ARM had three investors: Acorn, Apple and chip company VLSI Technology Inc (VTI).

tw04 11y ago

I'm more interested to see what Amazon ends up doing with annapura (sp?) labs.

newman314 11y ago
It wasn't clear if Annapurna was still going to make chips available to other companies. Their premise certainly is very interesting and it would be a bummer to be just Amazon specific

potrebitel22 11y ago

>pple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA Citation needed. Different from Anand's mentioning of "custom designed implementation of ARM ISA" on his webpage without any proof and further copied and taken to Wikipedia. One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. Of course the chip is a custom design ( as it mentioned @ Wikipedia ), because ARM generally do not provide the peripherals and you can "bolt" whatever you like. Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves. The wild rumor goes to their attempt to ditch BRCM for wifi's chips for ages, something that would have happened if they had the resources to design something themselves. Not to mention the huge chunk of chip on the new macbook 12", rumored to be from the acquisition of Anobit, which if you have some knowledge of design is at least 4 generations behind. That of course is a speculation, much like Anand's quote of "custom ISA implementation" from A8 and onward, but at least the nm process can be seen to be quite old.

newman314 11y ago
Apple did buy PA Semi so they do have some chops there.
kogepathic 11y ago
> Citation needed. > One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. I don't work for Apple, and if I did I would value my job more over satisfying your need for a citation. But anyway, since I cannot prove or disprove that Apple did design their own chip, which they did, I will point out that NVidia, a much smaller company, has managed to do just what I claimed, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver > Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves. Really? I think their purchase of a processor design company in 2008 speaks to the fact that they do have this talent in house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi PA Semi designed their own POWER CPU, which they developed from scratch. Don't tell me these people (who work for Apple now) don't have the capabilities and resources to design a processor which can implement the ARM ISA. Either provide a citation that proves that Apple hasn't designed their own core implementing the ARM ISA, or stop demanding some from my claim, which has a lot more evidence behind it. The fact that they have dual sourced CPUs from TSMC and Samsung, which are on different processor nodes, thus requiring a different layout and mask, tells me that Apple's hardware engineers absolutely know what they're doing, and can design the internals of a chip: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i... Plus, around the time of the PA Semi acquisition, news outlets reported that the engineers were working on a custom CPU for Apple devices: http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_working_on_arm_chip_for_next_gen_iphone http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_wor... I honestly don't know why I put so much time into refuting this. Many other people on the internet think that Apple is designing their own core inside the iPhone, how else would a dual core chip smoking the living shit out of Samsung and Qualcomm's quad and octo core processors? Here, have another person who says Apple design it themselves. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=50614391 http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=506143...