10 ms·

As Moore’s Law slows, Apple is forced to use cheaper chipsets in non-pro iPhones

36 points by nixass 5y ago

macintux 5y ago
Seems less "forced" and more "why didn't we do this sooner?". The CPU has been plenty fast for a few generations now.
- jagger27 5y ago
  I'm inclined to agree, and using the last gen part makes a lot of sense from a cost point of view, though it can make low power devices tricky. Apple is probably already at a point where it can make two different chips of the same generation meant for iPhone and the base model iPad. Perhaps something like P-series for the "pro" model iPhones and a much smaller (transistor count, die size) lower power A-series for the main line. They could use the same core designs, similar to what they do with M1 and M1 Pro/Max.
dijit 5y ago
I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. but CPUs themselves have been great for a long time. The A13 is the fastest CPU on the planet for rendering javascript (though not sure if faster than M1, as they probably have the same pedigree), so surely some of that CPU can be sacrificed. It would be nicer to have a slower/more efficient CPU and a smaller phone. That some people like big phones is a happy accident, or a genius marketing play, or both. Maybe I'm wrong though.
- superkuh 5y ago
  That's certainly part of it. Since 5G modulations actually only provide 15-20% increased thoroughput compared to 4G almost all of the advertised "increases in speed" for 5G networks have to come from using new spectrum. And the only remaining spectrum, well, sucks. So another part is the complete fiasco that are the mixed up, rarely overlapping, mm-wave 5G band definitions across the world meaning more discrete antennas are needed in each phone. Additionally the requirement for multiple antennas for each of these actual band for the higher frequencies because they have to beamform. And the power requirements for the frequency multipliers/etc and other frontend RF stuff for each set of these.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  > That some people like big phones is a happy accident, or a genius marketing play, or both. I think around the time of the iPhone 4 there was a bunch of hubbub from Apple about how bigger phones aren't as usable with one hand, so they weren't making them. Then they go and release the Max a few years later. :) I think people regard phones in different ways, with the phone power users wanting a mini tablet, and other people wanting something much smaller. There is a significant contingent of people who practically live on their phone, so I can understand wanting a huge screen.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    The iPhone 4 was released while Steve Jobs was still alive. After he died, the "faster horse" contingent of Apple had a stronger voice.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > I think people regard phones in different ways, with the phone power users wanting a mini tablet, and other people wanting something much smaller. There is a significant contingent of people who practically live on their phone, so I can understand wanting a huge screen. My mother wants a big phone, "biggest that still fits in my purse" as she puts it. She isn't a power user, and she doesn't use the phone all that much, it's her iPad that she lives on. I think the reason big phones won out over small ones isn't because of some sneaky marketing push, it's because the largest part of the market wants big phones instead of tiny screens that fit in one hand. It's similar to the car enthusiasts who insist a manual brown diesel wagon would sell well, but of course that's just the loudest 10 people on the Internet.
  - anonymouse008 5y ago
    This. I will never forget the 4S for Siri - it was the last 'meaningful' product release from Apple. Everything else has been an optimization function - different sizes and colors to extract from all consumer price points... etc. Unfortunately I get the feeling the A/M series are a vertical integration decision first, followed by the Apple product mission. The way you can tell the M/A processors are primarily optimizations is in the marketing and API improvements. Instead of trumpeting, write-once-run-everywhere, for iOS, iPad, and Mac, they tried in 2020 and it feel on deaf ears so they just gave it up - and now it's primarily a battery life discussion (longer lasting horse?)... To me, the reason a developer can't understand the messaging is precisely because the device classes are intermingled (calling back to capturing the demand curve rather than building for a consumer purpose [the complicated question to parent's consumer preferences, with a Jobs required answer]) which complicates UI principles / code for developers. And really, a lot of apps are meant to live in each device class - not every one of them is a global life service - which Apple must get right if they are to do AR right. I will concede though, as of today, the optimizations do appear to serve the customer in a 'just-as-good' fashion. So my critiques are only a 'maybe they left some on the table' - they are still the best, bar none.
- chasil 5y ago
  It has been observed that finfet devices have lower reliability than planar transistors; it appears that 28nm planar would have better reliability than anything Apple is making now. Of course, the CPU would be larger and perhaps less power-efficient. Higher reliability also might not be a design goal, as there is no reason to outlive the term of software support.
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  Not sure if the SE is as small as you want, but FWIW they've just put an A15 into the SE and kept the size the same.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    The first SE (iPhone 5 hardware) and the current mini have a great hardware design. All of the other SEs I would never consider, and the mini is likely EOL’d. Which is sad, because the mini is my favorite iPhone of all time.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      What makes you thing the mini is EOL? I know it didn't sell that well, but that would surprise me. I think at worst they'll use start using the current mini form factor for a new SE.
      - gonehome 5y ago
        Just a feeling - they barely mentioned it at the last iPhone event, sales numbers are purportedly poor. Maybe they’ll bring the body back as an SE, but we likely won’t have a high-end small phone again.
        Angostura 5y ago
        You think the iPhone 13 Mini will be the last of the line? I doubt it.
        gonehome 5y ago
        I hope you're right of course, but I suspect you're not: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iphone+mini+discontinued&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iphone+mini+discontinued&ia=web
        gonehome 5y ago
        Looking like it’s dead: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980216/apple-iphone-mini-hopefully-alive https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980216/apple-iphone-min...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. If that was all there was to it, they could just bring back the "brick" form factor that was all the rage pre-smartphones, just with a smaller touchscreen.
- Angostura 5y ago
  > I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. I specifically bought an iPhone 13 Mini because its small form-factor, good specs and pretty decent battery life.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whynotminot 5y ago
This is the same guy who wrote a piece talking about brain-drain on Apple's silicon team, and how the A15 proved that Apple's engineering prowess had faltered. And then the A15 actually came out and Anandtech analysis showed it was a normal year for the A series chips, with reasonable, even impressive performance and efficiency gains year over year. In other words, there's some interesting bits of information here since the guy does appear to have some level of supply chain / industry access, but any time he leans into his own analysis or editorial, I'd be skeptical.
- moffatman 5y ago
  It's true that the new core slipped from A15 to A16. The improvements while real were just clock bumps. I'm interested to see if M2 will use the new cores or not.
- chasil 5y ago
  What is interesting is the observation that cost-per-transistor is rising: "2018 was Apple’s last major step down in cost per transistor due to TSMC’s N10 to N7 process node shrink. With the transition from N7 to N5, the cost benefits were relatively small due to SRAM scaling issues. N7 is entering its 5th year of production, and N5 is now at its 3rd, yet the only hint of per wafer pricing changes have been in the wrong direction... Due to the way the 3 major DRAM companies have slowly increased output, cost per bit of DRAM has not really fallen." Sophie Wilson (inventor of the original ARM instruction set) has been saying that cost-per-transistor has been rising for several years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    That's not a new observation, as you mention. However as trailing-edge nodes improve and mature, their cost-per-area should still tend to drop over time. So, in a way, Moore's law might still be full effect despite developments "running ahead of it" at the leading nodes.
  - dylan522p 5y ago
    Sophie's analysis contemplates a set unit volume and fixed costs related to design and verification and tape out. Mine is on pure cost/transistor based on wafer costs as a player like Apple has the units to spread fixed costs over.
mrfusion 5y ago
Actually moores law is Alive and well. https://getdigitaltech.com/scientists-simply-made-a-graphene-transistor-gate-the-width-of-an-atom/ https://getdigitaltech.com/scientists-simply-made-a-graphene...
- esperent 5y ago
  Fascinating stuff. But: > To be clear, the work is a proof of idea: The researchers haven’t meaningfully scaled the strategy. Fabricating a handful of transistors isn’t the identical as manufacturing billions on a chip and flawlessly making billions of these chips to be used in laptops and smartphones. Ren additionally factors out that 2D supplies, like molybdenum disulfide, are nonetheless dear and manufacturing high-quality stuff at scale is a problem. Raises a question I've had for a while - is Moore's Law based on current production silicon or cutting edge research silicon that doesn't exist in consumer products yet? The products in this article could be 5, 10, or 15 (or infinity) years away from large scale manufacturer. Do they count?
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Moore's law is very much about real, commercial products and economics of manufacturing hem. https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/... These "research" transistors have never had any bearing on the reality of economically manufacturing products. Here's a paper way back 50 years ago they were already making tiny transistors with electron beam processes https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5391506 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5391506 - it would be about another 15 years before commercial chips were made with this transistor dimension, and that's 15 years at the height of Moore's law. Not to say they don't inform what might be possible and advance knowledge of the physics, but it's not much of a predictor about what might become economically viable to make.
greedo 5y ago
I think this really belongs in "Hacker Speculation" not Hacker News. The source is usually reliable, but this is just an unconfirmed rumor.
ip26 5y ago
Sidebar, apparently the Mini is a flop, but ironically in my social circle of engineers, 90% of iPhone users have a Mini. I hope it’s demise is just a rumor.
- francisofascii 5y ago
  Why is it a flop?
  - ip26 5y ago
    It’s supposedly only 5-10% of iPhone sales.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Bunch of my non-engineer friends like the size and form factor as well. I imagine the SE will carry the mantle of the Mini going forward. That's fine with me, I've switched to upgrading my phone every 4-5 years anyway.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Every engineer I know has a laptop or desktop for “proper computing” and most rely on their phone primarily for status updates and information. Whereas in the wider population the appeal of a full computer is more limited: people are more likely to throw cash at a bigger screen for better media consumption and gaming, and maybe have a cheap laptop for times where you really need a keyboard and desktop software.
  - dagw 5y ago
    cash at a bigger screen for better media consumption and gaming I think you are underestimating how much people are using their phones for content creation. My daughter uses her phone for her entire video production pipeline. She records and edits videos, does compositing and animation, mixes audio, does photo editing etc. all on her iPhone. I've tried several times to show her the advantages of using a 'real' computer with 'real' software, but she just finds it slow and annoying.
ksec 5y ago
There are lots of things I could nitpick in this article such as the $40 increase in BOM ( No, just No ). But I have a hypothesis as to why only the iPhone Pro gets A16 (4nm). The M2 will be using the same 4nm and uArch, GPU, NPU design from A16. ( I am hoping it would break the 2000 GB5 barrier ) And Apple will slowly rollout M2 on Mac over the course of next 18 months. Starting with Mac Pro first. The whole Mac Lineup are currently in huge demand, and if I remember correctly Tim Cook himself mentioned the Mac is breaking shipment record. One could extrapolate using sales data and I expect this to be something like 25M unit rather than the usual 18-20M unit. Apple wants to capture these market as soon as possible. Considering they could have lost a lot of Mac users over the last 3 - 4 years. ( They haven't updated the Active Mac user since 2018, some numbers just dont add up ). Making sure they have enough capacity to feed whatever Mac sales they have. As some have reported they are still waiting for their October / November MacBook Pro Order.
- dylan522p 5y ago
  Why no on the BOM increase? That is what the switch to LP5 and A16 would be.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

36 points by nixass 5y ago

macintux 5y ago

Seems less "forced" and more "why didn't we do this sooner?". The CPU has been plenty fast for a few generations now.

jagger27 5y ago
I'm inclined to agree, and using the last gen part makes a lot of sense from a cost point of view, though it can make low power devices tricky. Apple is probably already at a point where it can make two different chips of the same generation meant for iPhone and the base model iPad. Perhaps something like P-series for the "pro" model iPhones and a much smaller (transistor count, die size) lower power A-series for the main line. They could use the same core designs, similar to what they do with M1 and M1 Pro/Max.

dijit 5y ago

I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. but CPUs themselves have been great for a long time. The A13 is the fastest CPU on the planet for rendering javascript (though not sure if faster than M1, as they probably have the same pedigree), so surely some of that CPU can be sacrificed. It would be nicer to have a slower/more efficient CPU and a smaller phone. That some people like big phones is a happy accident, or a genius marketing play, or both. Maybe I'm wrong though.

superkuh 5y ago
That's certainly part of it. Since 5G modulations actually only provide 15-20% increased thoroughput compared to 4G almost all of the advertised "increases in speed" for 5G networks have to come from using new spectrum. And the only remaining spectrum, well, sucks. So another part is the complete fiasco that are the mixed up, rarely overlapping, mm-wave 5G band definitions across the world meaning more discrete antennas are needed in each phone. Additionally the requirement for multiple antennas for each of these actual band for the higher frequencies because they have to beamform. And the power requirements for the frequency multipliers/etc and other frontend RF stuff for each set of these.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
> That some people like big phones is a happy accident, or a genius marketing play, or both. I think around the time of the iPhone 4 there was a bunch of hubbub from Apple about how bigger phones aren't as usable with one hand, so they weren't making them. Then they go and release the Max a few years later. :) I think people regard phones in different ways, with the phone power users wanting a mini tablet, and other people wanting something much smaller. There is a significant contingent of people who practically live on their phone, so I can understand wanting a huge screen.
- bitwize 5y ago
  The iPhone 4 was released while Steve Jobs was still alive. After he died, the "faster horse" contingent of Apple had a stronger voice.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > I think people regard phones in different ways, with the phone power users wanting a mini tablet, and other people wanting something much smaller. There is a significant contingent of people who practically live on their phone, so I can understand wanting a huge screen. My mother wants a big phone, "biggest that still fits in my purse" as she puts it. She isn't a power user, and she doesn't use the phone all that much, it's her iPad that she lives on. I think the reason big phones won out over small ones isn't because of some sneaky marketing push, it's because the largest part of the market wants big phones instead of tiny screens that fit in one hand. It's similar to the car enthusiasts who insist a manual brown diesel wagon would sell well, but of course that's just the loudest 10 people on the Internet.
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  This. I will never forget the 4S for Siri - it was the last 'meaningful' product release from Apple. Everything else has been an optimization function - different sizes and colors to extract from all consumer price points... etc. Unfortunately I get the feeling the A/M series are a vertical integration decision first, followed by the Apple product mission. The way you can tell the M/A processors are primarily optimizations is in the marketing and API improvements. Instead of trumpeting, write-once-run-everywhere, for iOS, iPad, and Mac, they tried in 2020 and it feel on deaf ears so they just gave it up - and now it's primarily a battery life discussion (longer lasting horse?)... To me, the reason a developer can't understand the messaging is precisely because the device classes are intermingled (calling back to capturing the demand curve rather than building for a consumer purpose [the complicated question to parent's consumer preferences, with a Jobs required answer]) which complicates UI principles / code for developers. And really, a lot of apps are meant to live in each device class - not every one of them is a global life service - which Apple must get right if they are to do AR right. I will concede though, as of today, the optimizations do appear to serve the customer in a 'just-as-good' fashion. So my critiques are only a 'maybe they left some on the table' - they are still the best, bar none.
chasil 5y ago
It has been observed that finfet devices have lower reliability than planar transistors; it appears that 28nm planar would have better reliability than anything Apple is making now. Of course, the CPU would be larger and perhaps less power-efficient. Higher reliability also might not be a design goal, as there is no reason to outlive the term of software support.
mcintyre1994 5y ago
Not sure if the SE is as small as you want, but FWIW they've just put an A15 into the SE and kept the size the same.
- gonehome 5y ago
  The first SE (iPhone 5 hardware) and the current mini have a great hardware design. All of the other SEs I would never consider, and the mini is likely EOL’d. Which is sad, because the mini is my favorite iPhone of all time.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    What makes you thing the mini is EOL? I know it didn't sell that well, but that would surprise me. I think at worst they'll use start using the current mini form factor for a new SE.
    - gonehome 5y ago
      Just a feeling - they barely mentioned it at the last iPhone event, sales numbers are purportedly poor. Maybe they’ll bring the body back as an SE, but we likely won’t have a high-end small phone again.
      - Angostura 5y ago
        You think the iPhone 13 Mini will be the last of the line? I doubt it.
        gonehome 5y ago
        I hope you're right of course, but I suspect you're not: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iphone+mini+discontinued&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iphone+mini+discontinued&ia=web
        gonehome 5y ago
        Looking like it’s dead: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980216/apple-iphone-mini-hopefully-alive https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/16/22980216/apple-iphone-min...
zozbot234 5y ago
> I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. If that was all there was to it, they could just bring back the "brick" form factor that was all the rage pre-smartphones, just with a smaller touchscreen.
Angostura 5y ago
> I think the large push by manufacturers into large phones is primarily due to battery life and power hungry CPUs. I specifically bought an iPhone 13 Mini because its small form-factor, good specs and pretty decent battery life.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whynotminot 5y ago

This is the same guy who wrote a piece talking about brain-drain on Apple's silicon team, and how the A15 proved that Apple's engineering prowess had faltered. And then the A15 actually came out and Anandtech analysis showed it was a normal year for the A series chips, with reasonable, even impressive performance and efficiency gains year over year. In other words, there's some interesting bits of information here since the guy does appear to have some level of supply chain / industry access, but any time he leans into his own analysis or editorial, I'd be skeptical.

moffatman 5y ago
It's true that the new core slipped from A15 to A16. The improvements while real were just clock bumps. I'm interested to see if M2 will use the new cores or not.
chasil 5y ago
What is interesting is the observation that cost-per-transistor is rising: "2018 was Apple’s last major step down in cost per transistor due to TSMC’s N10 to N7 process node shrink. With the transition from N7 to N5, the cost benefits were relatively small due to SRAM scaling issues. N7 is entering its 5th year of production, and N5 is now at its 3rd, yet the only hint of per wafer pricing changes have been in the wrong direction... Due to the way the 3 major DRAM companies have slowly increased output, cost per bit of DRAM has not really fallen." Sophie Wilson (inventor of the original ARM instruction set) has been saying that cost-per-transistor has been rising for several years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4ZNfvw1cw
- zozbot234 5y ago
  That's not a new observation, as you mention. However as trailing-edge nodes improve and mature, their cost-per-area should still tend to drop over time. So, in a way, Moore's law might still be full effect despite developments "running ahead of it" at the leading nodes.
- dylan522p 5y ago
  Sophie's analysis contemplates a set unit volume and fixed costs related to design and verification and tape out. Mine is on pure cost/transistor based on wafer costs as a player like Apple has the units to spread fixed costs over.

mrfusion 5y ago

Actually moores law is Alive and well. https://getdigitaltech.com/scientists-simply-made-a-graphene-transistor-gate-the-width-of-an-atom/ https://getdigitaltech.com/scientists-simply-made-a-graphene...

esperent 5y ago
Fascinating stuff. But: > To be clear, the work is a proof of idea: The researchers haven’t meaningfully scaled the strategy. Fabricating a handful of transistors isn’t the identical as manufacturing billions on a chip and flawlessly making billions of these chips to be used in laptops and smartphones. Ren additionally factors out that 2D supplies, like molybdenum disulfide, are nonetheless dear and manufacturing high-quality stuff at scale is a problem. Raises a question I've had for a while - is Moore's Law based on current production silicon or cutting edge research silicon that doesn't exist in consumer products yet? The products in this article could be 5, 10, or 15 (or infinity) years away from large scale manufacturer. Do they count?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Moore's law is very much about real, commercial products and economics of manufacturing hem. https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/... These "research" transistors have never had any bearing on the reality of economically manufacturing products. Here's a paper way back 50 years ago they were already making tiny transistors with electron beam processes https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5391506 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5391506 - it would be about another 15 years before commercial chips were made with this transistor dimension, and that's 15 years at the height of Moore's law. Not to say they don't inform what might be possible and advance knowledge of the physics, but it's not much of a predictor about what might become economically viable to make.

greedo 5y ago

I think this really belongs in "Hacker Speculation" not Hacker News. The source is usually reliable, but this is just an unconfirmed rumor.

ip26 5y ago

Sidebar, apparently the Mini is a flop, but ironically in my social circle of engineers, 90% of iPhone users have a Mini. I hope it’s demise is just a rumor.

francisofascii 5y ago
Why is it a flop?
- ip26 5y ago
  It’s supposedly only 5-10% of iPhone sales.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
Bunch of my non-engineer friends like the size and form factor as well. I imagine the SE will carry the mantle of the Mini going forward. That's fine with me, I've switched to upgrading my phone every 4-5 years anyway.
robin_reala 5y ago
Every engineer I know has a laptop or desktop for “proper computing” and most rely on their phone primarily for status updates and information. Whereas in the wider population the appeal of a full computer is more limited: people are more likely to throw cash at a bigger screen for better media consumption and gaming, and maybe have a cheap laptop for times where you really need a keyboard and desktop software.
- dagw 5y ago
  cash at a bigger screen for better media consumption and gaming I think you are underestimating how much people are using their phones for content creation. My daughter uses her phone for her entire video production pipeline. She records and edits videos, does compositing and animation, mixes audio, does photo editing etc. all on her iPhone. I've tried several times to show her the advantages of using a 'real' computer with 'real' software, but she just finds it slow and annoying.

ksec 5y ago

There are lots of things I could nitpick in this article such as the $40 increase in BOM ( No, just No ). But I have a hypothesis as to why only the iPhone Pro gets A16 (4nm). The M2 will be using the same 4nm and uArch, GPU, NPU design from A16. ( I am hoping it would break the 2000 GB5 barrier ) And Apple will slowly rollout M2 on Mac over the course of next 18 months. Starting with Mac Pro first. The whole Mac Lineup are currently in huge demand, and if I remember correctly Tim Cook himself mentioned the Mac is breaking shipment record. One could extrapolate using sales data and I expect this to be something like 25M unit rather than the usual 18-20M unit. Apple wants to capture these market as soon as possible. Considering they could have lost a lot of Mac users over the last 3 - 4 years. ( They haven't updated the Active Mac user since 2018, some numbers just dont add up ). Making sure they have enough capacity to feed whatever Mac sales they have. As some have reported they are still waiting for their October / November MacBook Pro Order.

dylan522p 5y ago
Why no on the BOM increase? That is what the switch to LP5 and A16 would be.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]