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This article appears to have been written by someone who heard about Apple's chips and, since it was new to them, decided it was actually new. Respect to Apple
by foobiekr 3y ago
This article appears to have been written by someone who heard about Apple's chips and, since it was new to them, decided it was actually new.
Respect to Apple, but internal ASIC teams is nothing new in a lot of the tech industry, and I don't mean Google's TMU stuff or the Annapurna team at AWS. Those guys were following a long trend of ASIC teams in companies - e.g., ALL of the networking industry except Arista has been running this way for the last three decades.
I mean, after the 68k era, the _entire Unix workstation market_ - IBM, HP, DEC, SGI, etc. - was entirely built around in-house ASIC teams building their own CPUs.
I find it exciting, but what it really is, at the end of the day, is verticalization so that they don't have _as deep_ of a margin stack on their CPUs. Microsoft and Sony have gotten a series of custom CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, etc. over the last twenty years without owning the whole stack or losing the ability to apply optimizations. That's been common forever.
Apple is doing an amazing job. It started with acquiring the PA Semi team and has grown from there, they've been amazing and consistent about it and it's awesome execution and _sticking to the investment profile required_, but .. eh, the article just seems utterly unfamiliar with any broader context.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Respect to Apple, but internal ASIC teams is nothing new in a lot of the tech industry It's not new indeed, but Apple was the first to turn custom in house chips into a major selling point. For example Samsung was vertically integrated for a long time, with their in-house Exynos chips and modems, yet they couldn't capitalize with that in their phones, as they often fell behind Qualcomm in CPU-GPU performance, modem reception and battery life. Being vertically integrated is not enough if those parts you're making in house are mediocre and don't enhance the final product.
- foobiekr 3y agoNo, they aren’t. Literally any of the examples I give did that. Not in consumer, but elsewhere.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fulafel 3y agoAnother thing that everyone has been doing for decades: “We built what we call the unified memory architecture that is scalable across products”