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How did Apple become so successful making high-end CPU chips on their own so quickly?
by 300bps 3y ago
How did Apple become so successful making high-end CPU chips on their own so quickly?
- beckingz 3y agoProbably billions of dollars in R&D and extremely clear executive guidance?
- PedroBatista 3y agoWhat is "quickly" for you? They don't "make" them, they design it.
- kube-system 3y ago20 years ago, Palo Alto Semiconductor was founded, and 15 years ago, Apple bought them in order to start building their own CPUs.
- sosodev 3y agoThey've been doing this for years. It was just mobile only at first.
- kccoder 3y agoThey've been designing the A-series chips in iPhone and iPad since the A4 in 2010.
- CodeArtisan 3y agoA4 was still using ARM cores from Samsung. A6 was the first SoC with Apple cores.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jws 3y agoBring in people with expertise, buy outside expertise where you can, focus on the product you actually want instead of the product that will appeal to every possible use case for every possible customer that the chip marketing team can imagine, don't sweat where you can put the margin line between chip and system integrator, because they are both you. I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.
- christophilus 3y agoIt wasn’t that quickly if you consider the years of iPhone chips leading up to it.
- renewiltord 3y agoNot quickly. People have been predicting this since the PA Semi purchase.
- CodeArtisan 3y agoApple acquired PA Semi in 2008 then Intrinsity in 2010. They have been using their own ARM cores since 2012 with the A6 SoC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6
- jshier 3y agoThey first spent 10 years making their own mobile chips.
- tgmatt 3y agoI don't think we're comparing apples to apples here (excuse the pun). These chips have something like 10% of the instructions that a typical x86 chip does. Once the big CPU players start producing the same kind of chips, I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc.
- xcv123 3y ago> I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc Nope. Apple and AMD both use TSMC for manufacturing. It's all made by the same factory. AMD does not have the advantage there. Apple buys the most capacity on the most advanced process nodes since they place much bigger orders (Apple also has 10x more cash than AMD).
- hbbio 3y agoSo quickly 10 years in the making.
- fidotron 3y agoThe iPhone chip was seriously competitive with laptops 2-3 years before the M1, it's just that due to the software environment few people noticed what was going on. The real question is why Apple left it so long. They clearly wanted the first generation to be a clear success, but they could have probably pulled this off faster had they wanted to.