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Seeing how Apple licensed the full PowerVR hardware before, they probably currently have a license for the whatever hardware they based their design on.

brian_herman 4y ago
Also laywers that can keep it in court long enough for a redesign.
pyb 4y ago
Apple's claim is that they designed it themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_M1#[dubious_%E2%80%93_discuss]_GPU_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_M1#[dubious_%E2%80%...
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  There's no reason that couldn't be a half-truth - it could be a PowerVR with certain components replaced, or even the entire GPU replaced but with PowerVR-like commands and structure for compatibility reasons. Kind of like how AMD designed their own x86 chip despite it being x86 (Intel's architecture). Also, if you read Hector Martin's tweets (he's doing the reverse-engineering), Apple replacing the actual logic while maintaining the "API" of sorts is not unheard of. It's what they do with ARM themselves - using their own ARM designs instead of the stock Cortex ones while maintaining ARM compatibility.* *Thus, Apple has a right to the name "Apple Silicon" because the chip is designed by Apple, and just happens to be ARM-compatible. Other chips from almost everyone else use stock ARM designs from ARM themselves. Otherwise, we might as well call AMD an "Intel design" because its x86 by the same logic.
  - pyb 4y ago
    I haven't followed the announcements CPU side - do Apple clearly claim that they designed their own CPU (with an ARM instruction set)?
    - daneel_w 4y ago
      They are one of a handful of companies that hold a license allowing them to both customize the reference core and to implement the Arm ISA through their own silicon design. Everyone else's SoCs all use the same Arm reference mask. Qualcomm also holds such a license, which owes to their Snapdragon SoC, just like Apple's A- and M-series, occupying a performance hierarchy above everything else Arm.
      - pyb 4y ago
        Such a license is a big clue, but not quite what I was enquiring about...
        gjsman-1000 4y ago
        Qualcomm did use their own design called Kyro for a little while, but is now focusing on cores designed by Nuvia which they just bought for the future. As for Apple, they've designed their own cores since the Apple A6 which used the Swift core. If you go to the Wikipedia page, you can actually see the names of their core designs, which they improve every year. For the M1 and A14, they use Firestorm High-Performance Cores and Icestorm Efficiency Cores. The A15 uses Avalanche and Blizzard. If you visit AnandTech, they have deep-dives on the technical details of many of Apple's core designs and how they differ from other core designs including stock ARM. The Apple A5 and earlier were stock ARM cores, the last one they used being Cortex A9. For this reason, Apple is about as much an ARM chip as AMD is an Intel chip. Technically compatible, implementation almost completely different. It's also why Apple calls it "Apple Silicon" and it is not just marketing, but actually justified just as much as AMD not calling their chips Intel derivatives.
        amaranth 4y ago
        Kyro started as custom but flopped in the Snapdragon 820 so they moved to a "semi-custom" design, it's unclear how different it really is from the stock Cortex designs.
        GeekyBear 4y ago
  - quux 4y ago
    Didn't Apple have a large or even dominant role in the design of the ARM64/AArch64 architecture? I remember reading somewhere that they developed ARM64 and essentially "gave it" to ARM who accepted but nobody could understand at the time why a 64 bit extension to ARM was needed so urgently, and why some of the details of the architecture had been designed the way they had. Years later with Apple Silicon it all became clear.
    - kalleboo 4y ago
      The source is a former Apple engineer (now at Nvidia apparently) https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 > arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches > Arm64 didn’t appear out of nowhere, Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes. When Apple began selling iPhones containing arm64 chips, ARM hadn’t even finished their own core design to license to others. > ARM designed a standard that serves its clients and gets feedback from them on ISA evolution. In 2010 few cared about a 64-bit ARM core. Samsung & Qualcomm, the biggest mobile vendors, were certainly caught unaware by it when Apple shipped in 2013. > > Samsung was the fab, but at that point they were already completely out of the design part. They likely found out that it was a 64 bit core from the diagnostics output. SEC and QCOM were aware of arm64 by then, but they hadn’t anticipated it entering the mobile market that soon. > Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided. > M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago. > > ARMv8 is not arm64 (AArch64). The advantages over arm (AArch32) are huge. Arm is a nightmare of dependencies, almost every instruction can affect flow control, and must be executed and then dumped if its precondition is not met. Arm64 is made for reordering.
      - travisgriggs 4y ago
        > > M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago. This is such an interesting counterpoint to the occasional “Just ship it” screed (just one yesterday I think?) we see on HN. I have to say, I find this long form delivery of tech to be enlightening. That kind of foresight has to mean some level of technical saaviness at high decision making levels. Whereas many of us are caught at companies with short sighted/tech naive leadership who clamor to just ship it so we can start making money and recoup the money we’re losing on these expensive tech type developers.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    > Apple replacing the actual logic while maintaining the "API" of sorts is not unheard of. They did this with ADB, early PowerPC systems contained a controller chip that has the same API that was implemented in software in the 6502 IOP coprocessor in the IIfx/Q900/Q950.
kimixa 4y ago
They originally claimed they completely redesigned it and announced they were therefore going to drop the PowerVR architecture license - that was the reason for the stock price crash and Imagination Technologies sale in 2017. Then they have since scrubbed the internet of all such claims and to this day pay for an architecture license. I think it's similar to an ARM architecture license - where it's a license for any derived technology and patents rather than actually being given the RTL for powervr-designed cores. I worked at PowerVR during that time (I have Opinions, but will try to keep them to myself), and my understanding was that Apple hadn't actually taken new PowerVR RTL for a number of years and had significant internal redesigns of large units (e.g. the shader ISA was rather different from the PowerVR designs of the time), but presumably they still use enough of the derived tech and ideas that paying the architecture license is necessary. This transfer was only one way - we never saw anything internal about Apple's designs, so reverse engineering efforts like this are still interesting. And as someone who worked on the PowerVR cores (not the Apple derivatives) I can assure you all this discussed in the original post is extremely familiar.
- girvo 4y ago
  While I can understand why you might not want to in a public forum, I know I’d personally love to hear your Opinions on the matter!
  - kimixa 4y ago
    It's a small enough group that I'm likely personally identifiable anyway, so will be vague and try to stick to public info and my personal conjecture. Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly. And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release. My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite) That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.

brian_herman 4y ago

Also laywers that can keep it in court long enough for a redesign.

pyb 4y ago

Apple's claim is that they designed it themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_M1#[dubious_%E2%80%93_discuss]_GPU_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_M1#[dubious_%E2%80%...

gjsman-1000 4y ago
There's no reason that couldn't be a half-truth - it could be a PowerVR with certain components replaced, or even the entire GPU replaced but with PowerVR-like commands and structure for compatibility reasons. Kind of like how AMD designed their own x86 chip despite it being x86 (Intel's architecture). Also, if you read Hector Martin's tweets (he's doing the reverse-engineering), Apple replacing the actual logic while maintaining the "API" of sorts is not unheard of. It's what they do with ARM themselves - using their own ARM designs instead of the stock Cortex ones while maintaining ARM compatibility.* *Thus, Apple has a right to the name "Apple Silicon" because the chip is designed by Apple, and just happens to be ARM-compatible. Other chips from almost everyone else use stock ARM designs from ARM themselves. Otherwise, we might as well call AMD an "Intel design" because its x86 by the same logic.
- pyb 4y ago
  I haven't followed the announcements CPU side - do Apple clearly claim that they designed their own CPU (with an ARM instruction set)?
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    They are one of a handful of companies that hold a license allowing them to both customize the reference core and to implement the Arm ISA through their own silicon design. Everyone else's SoCs all use the same Arm reference mask. Qualcomm also holds such a license, which owes to their Snapdragon SoC, just like Apple's A- and M-series, occupying a performance hierarchy above everything else Arm.
    - pyb 4y ago
      Such a license is a big clue, but not quite what I was enquiring about...
      - gjsman-1000 4y ago
        Qualcomm did use their own design called Kyro for a little while, but is now focusing on cores designed by Nuvia which they just bought for the future. As for Apple, they've designed their own cores since the Apple A6 which used the Swift core. If you go to the Wikipedia page, you can actually see the names of their core designs, which they improve every year. For the M1 and A14, they use Firestorm High-Performance Cores and Icestorm Efficiency Cores. The A15 uses Avalanche and Blizzard. If you visit AnandTech, they have deep-dives on the technical details of many of Apple's core designs and how they differ from other core designs including stock ARM. The Apple A5 and earlier were stock ARM cores, the last one they used being Cortex A9. For this reason, Apple is about as much an ARM chip as AMD is an Intel chip. Technically compatible, implementation almost completely different. It's also why Apple calls it "Apple Silicon" and it is not just marketing, but actually justified just as much as AMD not calling their chips Intel derivatives.
        amaranth 4y ago
        Kyro started as custom but flopped in the Snapdragon 820 so they moved to a "semi-custom" design, it's unclear how different it really is from the stock Cortex designs.
        GeekyBear 4y ago
- quux 4y ago
  Didn't Apple have a large or even dominant role in the design of the ARM64/AArch64 architecture? I remember reading somewhere that they developed ARM64 and essentially "gave it" to ARM who accepted but nobody could understand at the time why a 64 bit extension to ARM was needed so urgently, and why some of the details of the architecture had been designed the way they had. Years later with Apple Silicon it all became clear.
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    The source is a former Apple engineer (now at Nvidia apparently) https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346470705446092811 > arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches > Arm64 didn’t appear out of nowhere, Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes. When Apple began selling iPhones containing arm64 chips, ARM hadn’t even finished their own core design to license to others. > ARM designed a standard that serves its clients and gets feedback from them on ISA evolution. In 2010 few cared about a 64-bit ARM core. Samsung & Qualcomm, the biggest mobile vendors, were certainly caught unaware by it when Apple shipped in 2013. > > Samsung was the fab, but at that point they were already completely out of the design part. They likely found out that it was a 64 bit core from the diagnostics output. SEC and QCOM were aware of arm64 by then, but they hadn’t anticipated it entering the mobile market that soon. > Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided. > M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago. > > ARMv8 is not arm64 (AArch64). The advantages over arm (AArch32) are huge. Arm is a nightmare of dependencies, almost every instruction can affect flow control, and must be executed and then dumped if its precondition is not met. Arm64 is made for reordering.
    - travisgriggs 4y ago
      > > M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago. This is such an interesting counterpoint to the occasional “Just ship it” screed (just one yesterday I think?) we see on HN. I have to say, I find this long form delivery of tech to be enlightening. That kind of foresight has to mean some level of technical saaviness at high decision making levels. Whereas many of us are caught at companies with short sighted/tech naive leadership who clamor to just ship it so we can start making money and recoup the money we’re losing on these expensive tech type developers.
- rjsw 4y ago
  > Apple replacing the actual logic while maintaining the "API" of sorts is not unheard of. They did this with ADB, early PowerPC systems contained a controller chip that has the same API that was implemented in software in the 6502 IOP coprocessor in the IIfx/Q900/Q950.

kimixa 4y ago

They originally claimed they completely redesigned it and announced they were therefore going to drop the PowerVR architecture license - that was the reason for the stock price crash and Imagination Technologies sale in 2017. Then they have since scrubbed the internet of all such claims and to this day pay for an architecture license. I think it's similar to an ARM architecture license - where it's a license for any derived technology and patents rather than actually being given the RTL for powervr-designed cores. I worked at PowerVR during that time (I have Opinions, but will try to keep them to myself), and my understanding was that Apple hadn't actually taken new PowerVR RTL for a number of years and had significant internal redesigns of large units (e.g. the shader ISA was rather different from the PowerVR designs of the time), but presumably they still use enough of the derived tech and ideas that paying the architecture license is necessary. This transfer was only one way - we never saw anything internal about Apple's designs, so reverse engineering efforts like this are still interesting. And as someone who worked on the PowerVR cores (not the Apple derivatives) I can assure you all this discussed in the original post is extremely familiar.

girvo 4y ago
While I can understand why you might not want to in a public forum, I know I’d personally love to hear your Opinions on the matter!
- kimixa 4y ago
  It's a small enough group that I'm likely personally identifiable anyway, so will be vague and try to stick to public info and my personal conjecture. Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly. And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release. My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite) That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.