
How Apple Built a Chip Powerhouse to Threaten Qualcomm and Intel - walterbell
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-apple-custom-chips/
======
gchadwick
I have only skimmed the article but two things jump out:

> Recently the company got a fresh incentive to go all-in on silicon:
> revelations that microprocessors with components designed by Intel Corp.,
> Arm Holdings Plc and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. are vulnerable to hacking.

Apple isn't immune: [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208394](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394) (indeed seems iOS
devices suffer from Meltdown where AMD devices do not).

> The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of
> Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel.

Surely to threaten dominance Apple needs to start selling it's chips to other
people? Whilst it's possible it would run counter to the way Apple likes to do
things, namely get as much in house a possible to get maximum control and
seamless vertical integration, they've never shown any interest in selling
bits of their technology to others (well recently anyway).

~~~
simonh
Apple may be a (large) minority purchaser of modem chips overall, but it's a
hugely dominant chunk of the market for high end devices. If they do their own
high end modems, it would gut the high end modem business for Qualcom. That
could also drive up prices and jeopardise supply for other high end phone
manufacturers. It might even make some high end features uneconomical for
Qualcom to include.

Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers
in CPUs. If they cripple Qualcomm's high end modem business by taking most of
it away from them, they could extend the same lead to modems.

~~~
garagemc2
> Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers
> in CPUs.

I hear this statement a lot... how is this determined?

~~~
simonh
Performance and features. In single threaded performance, Apple's A chips are
way ahead. That's because Apple highly customizes and optimizes their core
designs, while Qualcom and Samsung use largely vanila ARM reference designs
with maybe a few tweaks. Apple chips also have considerably more cache. That's
difficult for the competition to counter because they are very price sensitive
and cache size eats up expensive die space.

The counter argument is that the other systems make up for this by having more
cores, which is really a cop out. Single threaded execution has a far more
direct effect on user experience, gaming performance, etc. They can't compete
in core engineering so make it up by slapping on more fairly generic cores. It
does appear that Samsung is responding to this and investing in more advanced
core designs.

The final area is custom features like the neural engine behind real-time face
recognition, real time 3D face lighting effects and such. The competition
don't really have these at all, so we don't know how far behind they are.

There's a pretty good article on this linked below.

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4138071-apple-cpu-
advantage...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4138071-apple-cpu-advantage-
revisited)

~~~
servitor
The Samsung M1, M2 and soon the M3 are all fully custom.

~~~
simonh
Yep, it does look like Samsung may be in a position to catch up soon. That
could make a real problem for Qualcom the other Android manufacturers. Samsung
are the biggest manufacturer of high end Android phones. If Qualcom can't sell
high end CPUs to them any more, it might make manufacturing any truly high end
CPUs uneconomical, or at least drive up costs even further.

~~~
servitor
Watch out for what comes out of ARM Austin. Their last core was the A72 from a
couple of years ago. Rumour has it they've been working on a big core to
better compete with Apple and Samsung.

Looking back, it makes sense that Qualcomm discarded their underperforming
custom design efforts (at least for the mobile market). If ARM can deliver a
competitive design, why not fully commit to their roadmap and save significant
amounts on R&D costs?

~~~
sydd
Because if ARM cannot deliver they are fucked.

~~~
akvadrako
ARM is not just one company - it's a semi-standard.

~~~
Shikadi
Would you mind backing up your claim? To my knowledge, ARM is one company that
licenses their designs to other companies, who are free to parameterize and
modify as they please.

~~~
garagemc2
Why don't companies just come up with their own designs?

~~~
simonh
First off designing a whole core architecture from scratch is a huge and very
expensive undertaking. Youd need to be able to get a really big competitive
advantage to make it worthwhile.

Secondly theres a large ecosystem of add on components designed work with ARM
and be dropped into ARM SOCS, such as GPUs, Wifi modules, Gyroscopes, wireless
modems, GPS, etc.

Thirdly there are a lot of SOC engineers very familiar with ARM. You can hire
them streight from competitors, or college, including PHDs that have done
research on it. Youd need to train up any new hirs from scratch on your
architecture.

Finally theres a huge software development tool chain built around the
established processor architectures. To support a new architecture youd also
need to build a set of compiler back ends, bearing in mind the existing ones
benefit from many years of tweaking and optimization.

~~~
KSS42
Yes, SW is the key; especially Linux. ARM is way ahead of other embedded CPU
architectures in terms of Linux support.

------
masklinn
The SoC timeline is not uninteresting but it's lacking at least one of the
_major_ events: Apple switching from ARM-licensed to internally designed cores
with the A6. It should also outline the A7 more, that wasn't just Apple's
first 64b SoC, it was an industry-wide-first of shipping 64b cores in a
product, that took the industry very much by surprise (64b products were
planned for 12~24 months down the line before that IIRC).

These are the events which genuinely placed Apple on a serious footing as a
chip designer, the A4 was Apple-branded but only a preparatory step.

The essay also lacks other silicon acquisition of Apple, like Intrinsity,
whose work actually showed up as early as the A4 (before it was acquired).

It's also oddly padding the timeline with X-variants.

~~~
dave84
The opening paragraph also glosses over the fact that some of Apple's chips
are also vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre.

~~~
masklinn
I'd missed that, but you're perfectly correct.

It's also stating that Apple could topple Qualcomm… despite Apple not selling
to third parties, the only way that'd happen is if they obtained a complete
monopoly on the smartphone market. I don't see either happen.

~~~
rwmj
If Qualcomm sits around and does nothing. However Qualcomm are competing for
the nascent ARM server market with the (incredible IMO) Amberwing, and
Qualcomm would still have 50%+ of the mobile market for selling their modems
and Snapdragons to fund development.

------
antr
I can only hope for Apple to revive the Mac Mini, or the " Bring Your Own
Display, Keyboard and Mouse" concept.

I think there is a (small) market for Apple, but it is also a way bring new
users into the Mac ecosystem (although the iPhone/iPad do this).

I want a small, but affordable Mac to have as a backup and toy around... and
as a Mac user, the Mac Mini was perfect. I'll cross my fingers.

~~~
ksec
I think, Apple _should_ have a roadmap where all of their Mac will be SSD by
default. The current iMac and Mac mini, is still on super slow HDD.

But those NAND prices per GB aren't coming down. I think might be one of the
most important reason why Apple hasn't has new Mac mini.

This is especially true when Apple said APFS is specially designed for NAND,
and not HDD.

~~~
bradfa
NAND prices per GB are actually starting to come back down, now. Most of the
3D NAND tooling change-overs are completing at the various NAND fabs, so NAND
prices should only continue to fall in the coming months/years in $/GB pricing
metrics.

You can get consumer grade 500GB-class SATA 2.5" SSDs for $130 (or less!) now
from multiple vendors. This time last year these were up around $200 (EDIT:
this may not be accurate!). Consumer SATA SSDs were some of the first to
transition to 3D NAND.

For example: [https://camelcamelcamel.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Height-
SD...](https://camelcamelcamel.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Height-
SDSSDHII-480G-G25/product/B00M8ABFX6)

~~~
judge2020
Note that many of these high capacities SSDs are able to sell at lower prices
due to them not having any onboard dram, meaning the mapping data for wear
leveling is either stored on the nand itself or in the system ram which causes
random read/write to slow down a significant amount.

~~~
bradfa
DRAM is still extremely expensive, so you're probably on-point about part of
the low price being the lack of DRAM. It would be interesting to see tear
downs of current consumer and enterprise SSDs to better understand how they
work.

------
ENOTTY
> Apple has wisely focused on designing its silicon (for its system on a
> chips, Apple uses reference designs from Arm Holdings Plc).

I was under the impression that the current A cores are not reference designs
from ARM... That it was a purely Apple-designed core implementing the ARM ISA.
Am I mistaken or is the article mistaken?

~~~
JoachimS
Apple is one of very few companies that has an ISA license. This allows them
to implement the ARM ISAs using their own microarchitecture and physical
implementation.

Digital was afaik the first ISA licensee, which allowed them to design the
StrongARM.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM)

StrongARM ended up at Intel when they bought Digital. The design team for
StrongARM split up into two companies: SiByte and Alchemy. The design work i
in SV on StrongARM was lead by Daniel W. Dobberpuhl. Daniel was cofounder of
SiByte and (more relevant) founder of PA-Semi.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi)

PA-Semi was a fabless company that designed really powerful and power
efficient CPU cores based on the Power (PA) architecture. PA-Semi was really
good at both architecture, but also physical design for low power. PA-Semi was
acquired by Apple in 2008 (as mentioned in the article. Boutique chip maker is
an interesting phrase btw). PA-Semi basically became the processor design team
at Apple.

Looking at the timeline, the first A-series CPU (A4) was released in 2010
which would be possible for the PA-Semi team to have developed.

(If my understanding of the history is correct.)

~~~
dfox
Small correction: Intel didn't buy Digital, but got StrongARM with it's design
team (and IIRC some tangentially related products like 21152) as part of
settlement of some kind of patent dispute.

Also of note is that Success of HTC is to some extent also coming from DEC and
it's StrongARM reference platforms (mainly Itsy) which Compaq then
commercialized as iPaq which was manufactured by HTC (with pressumably HTC-
designed "HTC ASIC" which contained most of the various PDA-specific glue
required for StrongARM).

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> Intel didn't buy Digital

Compaq did. Rose to glory as an IBM PC clone maker, had enough cash to buy
busted out DEC, dwindled away in turn to be purchased by HP, if memory serves.

Sic transit.

------
walterbell
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/google-
is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/google-is-designing-
more-in-house-phone-chips-to-take-on-apple)

 _" Google officially closed its $1.1 billion deal with HTC Corp., adding more
than 2,000 smartphone specialists in Taiwan to help the search giant chase
Apple Inc. in the cut-throat premium handset market. The deal will help Google
design more of its own consumer hardware and could set it up to wade deeper
into special-purpose chips -- like Apple. Google’s most recent Pixel model
came with a new image processor to improve the device’s camera. More of this
"custom silicon" will come in the future, Google’s hardware chief Rick
Osterloh said in an interview._"

------
currysausage
I'm surprised they don't mention Jim Keller, the engineer who designed the
A4/A5 chips, as well as the AMD Zen and K8 (Athlon 64) microarchitectures:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_\(engineer\))

~~~
chmaynard
I'm surprised that you're surprised; this article clearly isn't meant to be a
serious piece of journalism. Regardless, thanks for posting a reference to Jim
Keller's wiki page.

------
nickpsecurity
I wonder if this all started with Apple buying the company behind this PowerPC
processor:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWRficient](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWRficient)

I rarely see that company mentioned when people talk about Apple getting into
hardware. What I dont know if it's because they were uninvolved in ARM-related
stuff done later or just not well known.

------
beaker52
I feel like this article is just an advert for Apple - in the wake of the
recent processor flaws we've collectively suffered.

------
Shivetya
I am not worried but instead welcome the integration of their chips to protect
the integrity of my machine's data from hackers or even government agencies.
That I fully support and expect to see.

I do seriously doubt they will move away from an Intel compatible platform, at
most if they did then perhaps AMD chips. If Apple took their Macs away from
Intel compatibility I doubt I would buy a new one and it would put into
question the ability to maintain what software library that exists for the
platform.

~~~
Anarch157a
On desktops or notebooks, where the power budget is much bigger an cooling
more efficient, they might push for a high performance ARM chip, coupled with
an x86 translation layer. They pulled this successfully twice already (m68k ->
PPC and PPC -> x86).

~~~
atomicnumber1
Considering that Microsoft is doing it, it's not unlikely. But, they seem to
also push iPad forward.

~~~
slantyyz
Didn't Intel start passively aggressively signalling that they'd start
enforcing their patents with lawsuits if companies do that?

~~~
jsjohnst
Yes, but that’s solveable by buying AMD.

------
TokyoKid
"But Apple is just good at marketing"

~~~
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