
A7: Apple's custom 64-bit silicon embarrassed the industry - geofox
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/02/a7-how-apples-custom-64-bit-silicon-embarrassed-the-industry
======
saagarjha
There's a lot of editorial speculation in this article:

> it was widely held among Android Enthusiasts that Samsung was rising up to
> fight back against the iPhone establishment, a sort of patron saint for
> Android. That was crazy

Way to classify an entire group of people :/

> Apple also had clear insight into whether or not a 64-bit SoC would be
> beneficial in accelerating apps. Qualcomm didn't run an App Store and wasn't
> maintaining a consumer mobile operating system.

They couldn't have, as none of the apps could run on the platform yet.

> while an original intent of LLVM was to bring the Mac's Objective-C language
> up to par with other languages in compiler sophistication

Lol, it was to move away from GPL tooling…

> Apple shared the Clang LLVM front end compiler for C, C++, and Objective-C
> as an open-source project in 2007, but it wasn't 2012 that it started to be
> widely adopted by various Unix distributions. It didn't become the default
> compiler for Android until 2016. In part, that's because Google wasn't
> creating Android to be a great product, but rather to simply serve as a good
> enough product to facilitate the development of a mobile platform it could
> tap into as an advertising platform without any restrictions imposed by
> Microsoft or Apple.

…

Honestly, it reads like a strung-together exercise to prove that Apple is "the
best".

~~~
ksec
>Honestly, it reads like a strung-together exercise to prove that Apple is
"the best"…

That is what you expect from DED ( Its Author ) and Appleinsider.

Both should have no place on HN. The same goes for WccfTech.

~~~
kick
"flag" is there for a reason.

~~~
ksec
And I did even before replying, but seeing it on Front page and currently
sitting at the top hurts me.

~~~
saagarjha
It's gone now.

------
jandrese
While I agree with the general thrust of the article that the 64bit A7
blindsided the rest of the industry, the way the article is written seems
overly partisan. I find it kind of hard to cut through the cheerleading to get
to the meat of the article.

~~~
reaperducer
_the way the article is written seems overly partisan_

I don't disagree. But it's to be expected from Apple Insider. It's a well-
known fanboi blog, it's not journalism. It would be nice if people would stop
posting links to it on HN and stick to more thoughtful publications.

~~~
saagarjha
This one is egregiously bad.

------
cletus
The whole phone industry for years has been a "me too" Android industry
following in Apple's footsteps and by that I mean phone manufacturers doing
half-assed versions of what Apple had.

There was a great talk at Google about how the Nexus 5X was the worst phone
they ever made. It was a postmortem and actually really informative. Like the
thermals were bad (eg hot components together) such that the CPU had to go in
low power mode when using the camera or the thing would overheat. Part of it
was they just happened to use a bad die process (20nm IIRC).

The interesting part was how Apple's announcement of a 64 bit CPU totally
shook the industry. Roadmaps were thrown out and half-assed 64 bit CPUs were
put into the market essentially for marketing purposes (the "64 bit" bullet
point).

Apple's ARM chips are actually pretty amazing and have mostly been at a sweet
spot for performance vs battery life.

To be fair, I think Apple has gone off the rails in the last few years. The
examples are numerous:

\- The 2015 MBP butterfly keyboard (rumour has it this only happened to shave
0.5mm off the laptop height)

\- The loss of Magsafe

\- USB-C

\- Force Touch (from a company that famously once eschewed the right mouse
button for lack of discoverability)

\- Face ID (what I'd give for Touch ID on the back of the phone). This was
purely to make a bigger screen. As much as they talked about the false
positive rate of Touch ID being too high the false negative rate of Face ID is
way too high, particularly on an iPad.

\- The Touch Bar

I really do think where Apple design went wrong was when there was no longer a
Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive. A lot of the more ridiculous design
fails seem to come directly from Ive (like the 12" Macbook).

But the CPU part of Apple is cutting edge.

~~~
zozbot234
> The interesting part was how Apple's announcement of a 64 bit CPU totally
> shook the industry.

I don't think so. The move to 64-bit compute on mobile platforms was
inevitable and hardly surprising; Apple's announcement might have pushed it
forward by a few years at most.

~~~
TMWNN
>Apple's announcement might have pushed it forward by a few years at most.

In the technology world, pushing an advance forward by a few years _is_
shaking the industry.

------
simonh
What the 64bit ISA did was move the discussion about who had the best chip
design team away from performance numbers, which are always messy and
arguable, and towards core engineering skill and capability.

Everyone in the ARM works knew the 64bit ISA was a huge deal. It was a
fundamental reimagining of the ARM ISA, laying down the foundations for the
future direction of ARM design. Nobody else was even trying to tackle this.
Nobody thought anybody else had even begun either.

~~~
jandrese
It was a problem only Apple was really poised to handle thanks to its vertical
integration. The rest of the industry was stuck in the chicken and egg
situation where the chip builders didn't own the software stack--the people
doing the software were in different companies.

The transition only works well if both the software and hardware are upgraded
in tandem. For Apple this is no problem, but for the rest of the industry you
have to be willing to put a lot of work into a product that won't do anything
until the other side catches up. It's much more risky. The general sense
seemed to be that they were waiting for memory sizes to grow large enough to
force the issue until Apple just went ahead and quietly pulled the trigger.

What is less forgivable is just how much of a performance gap the Android
market is seemingly willing to tolerate between the latest A* series chip and
whatever the fastest Android chip is. How is Qualcomm not terminally
embarrassed to announce brand new chips that are two years behind what Apple
is currently shipping?

~~~
wmf
_How is Qualcomm not terminally embarrassed to announce brand new chips that
are two years behind what Apple is currently shipping?_

If we assume Qualcomm is trying as hard as they can, what's their alternative?
Ship nothing? Commit corporate suicide in shame?

~~~
jandrese
Engineer better and faster chips? It's not like Apple has some insurmountable
process node advantage here or an ISA advantage. Everything is still some
flavor of ARM.

I guess I'm saying that it doesn't seem like Qualcomm is putting in as much
effort as they should. It should be embarrassing for them.

~~~
simonh
There's no incentive for Qualcomm to catch up. The flagship handset
manufacturers have nowhere else to go and really only competing with each
other.

Faster chips also mean more expensive chips, which would erode their price
competitiveness against the iPhone especially since they don't have the
volumes of the iPhone. In particular A series chips have huge and higher spec
caches compared to the Qualcomm chips, which take a lot of die space, which is
the prime factor in chip costs.

Finally, for Qualcomm to bring out a super-premium A series killer they would
have to know, for a fact, that all the Android manufacturers would adopt it.
If they didn't the per-unit costs would make them prohibitively expensive.
They just don't have the guaranteed volumes. If enough manufacturers passed,
the project would be a financial disaster. It's just too risky.

------
Aaronstotle
IIRC, Jim Keller was one of the lead engineers behind this chip, which is why
when I heard he was at AMD working on their new Zen architecture in 2015, I
knew it would be a success. He seems to create amazing processors then is off
to do it again at another company.

~~~
blattimwind
Yes, industry insiders know that the success of a microarchitecture is largely
determined by the work of a single person.

~~~
andybak
Can't tell if sarcasm.

~~~
saagarjha
It almost certainly is.

------
georgeecollins
One thing I do remember about this period is that Apple's stock actually got
fairly cheap compared to its earnings. Its PE got to like 12, which is fairly
amazing for a tech company with the kind of barriers to competition Apple has.
Investors really thought the iPhone might get undermined by Android phones in
the way PCs undermined the Macintosh.

You can say this article has a lot of opinion and speculation, but I think the
history of stock price shows that it is a retelling of conventional wisdom at
the time and today.

------
FernandoTN
The innovators dilemma talks about a similar situation with storage. Every x
years a new, smaller format would arrive and everybody would brush it aside
until after some time the benefits would be noticeable and everybody would
scramble to jump into the new format.

This process would go on to repeat itself, not always the innovators of
introducing a new format would be able to replicate this shift, mainly because
they would be victims of their own success and had to keep up with expected
revenue and margins.

------
baybal2
I do remember the talk why ArmV8 took so long for fabless vendors.

Nobody wanted to pay more for cores with no software support. They would've
either had to pull their own Android forks, and be sure that no game would
support them, or wait till ARM will release a core with both V8 and V7
support, and let marketing to feed people an idea that 32 bit code somehow
runs better on 64 bit cpu.

~~~
StillBored
<i>Nobody wanted to pay more for cores with no software support.</i>

This is just the general backwardness of many of the SOC providers. ARMv8 has
a 32-bit compatibility mode (aarch32) designed to run 32-bit software. So any
core produced would have run any of the existing android/etc OS's and
applications just fine with a path forward to 64-bit. Since all the major
players had their own core teams they could have been tasked with making armv8
cores, but instead were doing the minimum required. Its only after they got
broadsided by apple did they scramble to license ARM's cortex designs since
they didn't have any of their own.

edit: Just to add to this, despite the article, ARM was doing just fine in the
smartphone market selling a 32-bit architecture against mips & x86 which had a
64-bit architectures. The articles comments about the additional registers
fail to note that 32-bit arm had a pretty generous register layout (16 GPRs)
and wasn't at all register starved in relation to something like 32-bit x86.
Similarly with NEON/etc. QC/etc were right that 64-bit didn't bring much to
the smartphone market at that time except for a path forward. To this day
there are a lot of applications that fail to gain any benefit from going to
32-bit which is why x32 and the arm64 ilp32 ABI exist.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's not enough to just run existing code. You need new code to run.

~~~
mschuster91
It's a chicken and egg problem. No serious gamedev company is going to invest
in code that is capable of taking advantage of new stuff when there is not a
single one device on the market (and the issues of the first generation known
and work-aroundable), and no chipmaker is going to invest into radical
modernizations if there is no demand.

------
jenkstom
You lost me at "PC". That term died decades ago.

