| ▲ | master_crab 13 hours ago |
| The M-series are ARM chips based on the A series from the iPhones. Therefore Apple had ten years of chip design (plus the prior decades of ARM history) to rely on. The GPUs and modems were a much more recent effort. (My take. happy to be corrected by someone with chip design experience who can comment.) |
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| ▲ | SanDiegoSun 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I would argue their architecture choices long term proved to be prescient (RISC, ARM, etc) and securing TSMC production capacity (beating competitors to the punch) aided them as well. |
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| ▲ | adrian_b 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Their main architectural choice was not about "RISC" or "ARM" but it was choosing "Brainiac" over "Speed Demon", i.e. setting the goal to execute a great number of instructions per clock cycle at a moderate clock frequency, instead of executing a moderate number of instructions per clock cycle at a high clock frequency (the latter variant results in lower fabrication costs, which is why other companies were reluctant to pursue the same choice as Apple). A high IPC is much easier to achieve when the instructions have a fixed-length encoding, so this RISC principle followed from their main choice. | | |
| ▲ | rbanffy 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | ARM was chosen for the Newton, then the iPods, then the iPhone and so on. Apple’s experience with ARM has a long history. Same applies to RISC. Apple didn’t leave PPC because it was a dead-end. They went with Intel because IBM was not interested in developing a low power PPC just for Apple. IBM wasn’t (and still isn’t) even interested in developing a POWER chip for desktop workstations. If there are POWER machines that can be turned into workstations, it’s a side effect of them being targeted at entry-level half-rack systems. |
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| ▲ | eigenspace 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The iPhones had GPUs too. As far as I'm aware, the GPU design in the M-series chips are directly descended from the iPhone GPU in the exact same way the CPU is. |
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| ▲ | chocochunks 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Prior to the A11 chip they used PowerVR designed GPUs. They weren't done in house. | | |
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