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I wonder why apple is so persistent with using that awkward "apple silicon" wording more importantly why all blogs and journalists just copy it. Whats wrong wit

I wonder why apple is so persistent with using that awkward "apple silicon" wording more importantly why all blogs and journalists just copy it. Whats wrong with saying arm macs, apple chips, apple CPUs etc? Is anyone alse feeling weird about it?

sp332 6y ago
Apple Silicon is the brand of the chip, like Intel Xeon.
- Someone 6y ago
  More like “Intel Inside”, I would think. It separates their hardware from that of other companies, not from future versions of their hardware. I don’t see them moving to new names or to “Apple Silicon v2” when hardware advances.
grecy 6y ago
Pure speculation, but when they switched to "intel" they were effectively locked in, and they couldn't then have some intel and some AMD and some of their own x86 stuff. Now they're going to "Apple Silicon", it might be ARM this decade and who-knows-what next decade, but it will remain as reliable and fast and blah-blah as "Apple Silicon".
lanewinfield 6y ago
For the same reason they wouldn't call the iPod an "Apple MP3 player" or the iPhone "Apple cell phone"— they're reserving the space for their branding which is not yet solidified.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I think they want to highlight the custom silicon models that they have so far because we are now at the point that probably every product will have its own processor so you need some kind brand of what the goals are of Apple's strategy in the future. Also, its really good marketing and allows everyone to have the same talking points because if you want to explain the naming scheme of any processor manufacturer it will take longer than the amount of time that anyone has an actually attention span for people not interested in the subject already.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
That is what Apple’s chips with ARM instruction set are called. You don’t call AMD chips, Intel chips because they use intel instruction set. Likewise Apple’s CPUs are not designed by ARM. They are Apple designs licensing ARM instruction set
Someone 6y ago
It think they use the naming because their message is that they don’t slap a few random parts together, but optimize a complete design. Certainly, for many workloads, what matters isn’t the performance of the CPU but how efficiently it can offload those tasks to the GPU and ‘Neural Engine’. Those two parts also might use up the majority of the transistors. The CPU also _could_ have a few un-ARM-like extensions that help in emulating x86. It may be interesting to watch what gets committed to LLVM.
ksec 6y ago
For the same reason people dont say x86 Macs. And it is not a CPU so you cant say Apple CPU. If you say Apple SoC not everyone knows what is a SoC. Apple Silicon is much easier to understand for vast majority of consumers, and the name includes everything fro CPU, GPU, NPU, Video Encoder. etc. You may ask what happen when Wafer move away from Silicon.

sp332 6y ago

Apple Silicon is the brand of the chip, like Intel Xeon.

Someone 6y ago
More like “Intel Inside”, I would think. It separates their hardware from that of other companies, not from future versions of their hardware. I don’t see them moving to new names or to “Apple Silicon v2” when hardware advances.

grecy 6y ago

Pure speculation, but when they switched to "intel" they were effectively locked in, and they couldn't then have some intel and some AMD and some of their own x86 stuff. Now they're going to "Apple Silicon", it might be ARM this decade and who-knows-what next decade, but it will remain as reliable and fast and blah-blah as "Apple Silicon".

lanewinfield 6y ago

For the same reason they wouldn't call the iPod an "Apple MP3 player" or the iPhone "Apple cell phone"— they're reserving the space for their branding which is not yet solidified.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

I think they want to highlight the custom silicon models that they have so far because we are now at the point that probably every product will have its own processor so you need some kind brand of what the goals are of Apple's strategy in the future. Also, its really good marketing and allows everyone to have the same talking points because if you want to explain the naming scheme of any processor manufacturer it will take longer than the amount of time that anyone has an actually attention span for people not interested in the subject already.

socialdemocrat 6y ago

That is what Apple’s chips with ARM instruction set are called. You don’t call AMD chips, Intel chips because they use intel instruction set. Likewise Apple’s CPUs are not designed by ARM. They are Apple designs licensing ARM instruction set

Someone 6y ago

It think they use the naming because their message is that they don’t slap a few random parts together, but optimize a complete design. Certainly, for many workloads, what matters isn’t the performance of the CPU but how efficiently it can offload those tasks to the GPU and ‘Neural Engine’. Those two parts also might use up the majority of the transistors. The CPU also _could_ have a few un-ARM-like extensions that help in emulating x86. It may be interesting to watch what gets committed to LLVM.

ksec 6y ago

For the same reason people dont say x86 Macs. And it is not a CPU so you cant say Apple CPU. If you say Apple SoC not everyone knows what is a SoC. Apple Silicon is much easier to understand for vast majority of consumers, and the name includes everything fro CPU, GPU, NPU, Video Encoder. etc. You may ask what happen when Wafer move away from Silicon.