Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In
www.semianalysis.com
Apple's leading CPU team looks to be struggling as they have now delivered no CPU gains for the first generation ever. Apple likely had to delay their next core architecture due due to personnel overturn from the Nuvia exodus. Furthermore, with a new exodus surrounding Rivos, the future doesn't look so bright. Apple currently has the best client CPU cores, but can they hold this lead against stronger competition from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm?
Well it's specifically about the CPU and then it's specifically about unfounded, guess-journalism, speculation about the issues with the team, when in fact it looks like the team that's still in place and was involved in the development decided to concentrate on GPU, power drain and a whole host of other clever not CPU speed-headlining issues which actually make more noticeable real-world differences to the performance of the phone. We know they design and decide on the camera specs three years out, so a lot of the decisions on what the chip needs to do are baked in from that (the phones are already as fast as they could possibly need to be on CPU performance, so it's kind of meaningless at this point).
The leap between this year and last year is about 4x iPhone 5S (The A7 chip had 1B transistors). I don’t get why this advancement is described as “no gains”.
There’s a whole bunch of new functionality as you mentioned, which requires “more transistors” to maintain the same performance metrics, if we’re dumbing it down.
Apple simply delivered a faster and less power hungry chip.
Wait the A14 on the ipad air (4th gen) also has ~ 6100 in SFFT, does this means apple either disabled half of the FP32 units on the iphone 12s A14’s or they just ran it on a much lower frequency ?
Even Apple silicon must deal with Moore's law, so gains may start to diminish after a couple refreshes. I think the ARM model works well for Apple, specifically iPhones, iPads, and Macbook's. I am not so sure on heavy lifting desktops like the Mac Pro or an iMac Pro.
The A15 would have been taped out and in risk production well before staff left for Nuvia, and in fact before the Covid-19 shutdowns hit California hard. TSMC has also missed with 3nm by four months, it'll be ready for the next ipad/macbook generation in 04/2023.
Whatever happened to Apple's CPU team won't be visible until then.
Embarrassing take based on a single iteration and tons of baseless speculation.
How did this bullshit age?
No Mea Culpa, Dylan? You schooled yourself. Get your facts straight, please, before shilling for Intel and Qualcomm.
Well it's specifically about the CPU and then it's specifically about unfounded, guess-journalism, speculation about the issues with the team, when in fact it looks like the team that's still in place and was involved in the development decided to concentrate on GPU, power drain and a whole host of other clever not CPU speed-headlining issues which actually make more noticeable real-world differences to the performance of the phone. We know they design and decide on the camera specs three years out, so a lot of the decisions on what the chip needs to do are baked in from that (the phones are already as fast as they could possibly need to be on CPU performance, so it's kind of meaningless at this point).
The leap between this year and last year is about 4x iPhone 5S (The A7 chip had 1B transistors). I don’t get why this advancement is described as “no gains”.
There’s a whole bunch of new functionality as you mentioned, which requires “more transistors” to maintain the same performance metrics, if we’re dumbing it down.
Apple simply delivered a faster and less power hungry chip.
Wait the A14 on the ipad air (4th gen) also has ~ 6100 in SFFT, does this means apple either disabled half of the FP32 units on the iphone 12s A14’s or they just ran it on a much lower frequency ?
Even Apple silicon must deal with Moore's law, so gains may start to diminish after a couple refreshes. I think the ARM model works well for Apple, specifically iPhones, iPads, and Macbook's. I am not so sure on heavy lifting desktops like the Mac Pro or an iMac Pro.
The A15 would have been taped out and in risk production well before staff left for Nuvia, and in fact before the Covid-19 shutdowns hit California hard. TSMC has also missed with 3nm by four months, it'll be ready for the next ipad/macbook generation in 04/2023.
Whatever happened to Apple's CPU team won't be visible until then.
Pretty funny stuff. The charts look good & all, but overall the comic tone becomes repetitive and dull.
Apple tick-tocks between performance and screen upgrades.
Do you guys know that if Apple uses Arm V9 architecture for its A15 bionic chips or sill stick to Arm's V8 architecture?