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Apple is making a really strong push to differentiate it's chips from ARM. A few of the mac sites are claiming it's "Apple Silicon" and not "ARM". I believe t
by virtue3 6y ago
Apple is making a really strong push to differentiate it's chips from ARM. A few of the mac sites are claiming it's "Apple Silicon" and not "ARM". I believe the heart of it is that Apple has "followed the ARM spec" but did not use ARMs actual silicon designs.
I don't really know what the backing of this is either. I'm sure they added a few of their own instructions. And I read that they single handedly pushed the ARM platform to 64bit (citation needed, definitely not sure if that's really true).
- saagarjha 6y agoIt’s easier to just tweak some system registers than to do that (and indeed this is how Apple implements their proprietary “in-silicon” features).
- Followerer 6y ago"Apple Silicon" is a literal truth. The silicon design, the microarchitecture, is theirs, not ARM's. The architecture, this includes the ISA but also many other things that have to be taken into consideration in CPU design (exception model, consistency, virtual memory, virtualization,...), is ARM's. They simply don't want to tie their brand to ARM's, which is fair enough, Apple's brand is much more valuable than ARM's. Regarding the push for a 64-bit chip, I've heard the exact opposite. Aarch64 (64-bit ARM) was an ARM design without a customer, Apple were the first to buy into it. I've heard that many said it was a premature jump, and there was a lot of scepticism within ARM that they'd be able to sell it (this happened when ARM was selling mobile designs exclusively, with no intentions of getting into servers). Still, they went ahead with it, and was an unexpected success.