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Question as long as we're on the subject... software companies can decompile competitor's software and figure out how they did something. Can Qualcomm or anothe

Question as long as we're on the subject... software companies can decompile competitor's software and figure out how they did something. Can Qualcomm or another chip maker "decompile" the M1 and figure out how Apple made it? Apple seems so far ahead of the other ARM chipmakers, can the other guys catch up by studying the M1 chip? Or is it too small/involved/etc to learn much from?

skunkworker 6y ago
If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless they hire the right people to be in charge and even still, chips like Apple's A series are hand laid out and very, very time consuming to create. They have the ability to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the design, but even if you can start to reproduce their design (very time consuming) you're taking away resources from designing other processors. I asked a friend who used to work in chip design at IBM and was blown away by the design of the M1. according to my friend, the design is extremely custom and most likely hand laid out for their specific optimizations. Also they were stumped by how apple could be getting consistent timings between cores when the design isn't totally symmetric for a particular cluster.