Yeah, "first chip" here likely means they contracted Broadcom (or a firm with similar experience) to do all the heavy lifting. Building out your own in-house teams for this sort of thing is a decade-long project - just look how much inside Apple's early chips was licensed ARM / PowerVR cores

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MisterTea 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Apple didn't have the talent in-house until they bought Intrincity who worked with Samsung on Apple's earlier Arm chips as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity

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selectodude 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the folks at PA Semi had some chops too.

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stinkbeetle 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

PA Semi group did the logic designs. I think they're talking about physical design though.

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reinitctxoffset 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The way I heard it PA Semi was the singular driving force that led to Apple Silicon, but I'm not any kind of insider that's just the chatter I heard.

Whoever it was, whooo, that's hot shit. I remember an M1 MacBook Air just cleaning the clock of an Intel MacBook Pro and thinking "x86_64 has real competition again".

Great silicon. I'm over it with not having root on my own machine, so I've left the ecosystem, but it's really nice hardware, can't dispute that.

	▲	re-thc an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> The way I heard it PA Semi was the singular driving force that led to Apple Silicon And a lot of them are sitting under Qualcomm via the Nuvia acquisition.