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The Apple Silicon project has to have been fantastically expensive. They now use them in all of the watches, all of the phones, all of the macs, all of the ipa
by sneak 3y ago
The Apple Silicon project has to have been fantastically expensive.
They now use them in all of the watches, all of the phones, all of the macs, all of the ipads and ipad pros, all of the headphones, and the current and future AR systems (there is also a special Apple Silicon AR coprocessor in the Vision Pro, separate from
the Mx CPU/GPU/SoC).
They are designing and iterating like 4 or 5 different custom chips, with many of them incorporating industry-leading GPUs, and having them manufactured at scale (which I’m sure is not a simple handoff but involves additional engineering to support high yield manufacture).
This project alone is larger than most technology companies that have ever existed, and a lot of the staff for it must be extraordinarily compensated to retain them (as evidenced by the fact that a bunch of them recently left to start a new chip company (Nuvia) which was then acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B).
- novok 3y agoIMO for a place like apple, where they are buying chips in such volumes they define entire production runs anyway and define target design specs for vendors there is probably already a lot of cost they are consuming where adding something like the apple silicon design project is cheaper. The marginal cost of going full apple silicon is lower as a result. Apple has also been very frustrated with their chip vendors, especially intel, in making what they want so I imagine it started as a 'last resort' project after they've exhausted their vendors. While another smaller place that wanted to do something like apple silicon would have much higher marginal costs because they would need to spend on the things that apple was already spending on implicitly. It became an economy of scale thing.