It means that Apple isn't radically changing the internals of the SOC every year.
>Apple’s first iPhones ran on Samsung SoCs, and even as Apple famously announced that they were switching to their own designs, the underlying reality is that there was a slower transition away from Samsung over multiple chip generations. “Apple Silicon” chips, like any other SoC, contain IP cores licensed from many other companies; for example, the USB controller in the M1 is by Synopsys, and the same exact hardware is also in chips by Rockchip, TI, and NXP. Even as Apple switched their manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC, some Samsung-isms stayed in their chips… and the UART design remains to this day.
>Apple’s first iPhones ran on Samsung SoCs, and even as Apple famously announced that they were switching to their own designs, the underlying reality is that there was a slower transition away from Samsung over multiple chip generations. “Apple Silicon” chips, like any other SoC, contain IP cores licensed from many other companies; for example, the USB controller in the M1 is by Synopsys, and the same exact hardware is also in chips by Rockchip, TI, and NXP. Even as Apple switched their manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC, some Samsung-isms stayed in their chips… and the UART design remains to this day.
https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-febru...