Am I right in thinking that the old PA-Semi team was bought by Apple, and are substantially responsible for the success of the M-series parts?

▲

scrlk 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Acquiring P.A. Semi got them Dan Dobberpuhl and Jim Keller, which laid a good design foundation. However, IMO, I'd lean towards these as the decisive factors today:

1) Apple's financial firepower allowing them to book out SOTA process nodes

2) Apple being less cost-sensitive in their designs vs. Qualcomm or Intel. Since Apple sells devices, they can justify 'expensive' decisions like massive caches that require significantly more die area.

	▲	bombcar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		They also had years to keep improving the iPhone chips until they were so good at power efficiency that they could slap it into a laptop. That’s much better than a decade of development with no product yet.

▲

classichasclass 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

P.A. Semi contributed greatly to Apple silicon, but the company has nothing to do with PA-RISC. In fact, their most notable chip before Apple bought them was Power ISA.

▲

sgerenser 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

PA Semi (Palo Alto Semiconductor) had no relation to HP’s PA-RISC (Precision Architecture RISC).