A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone.
Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.
Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.
Apple purchased Palo Alto Semi which made the biggest difference. One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion… not that they make all that many of those anyway.
Apple actually makes a lot more acquisitions than you think, but they are rarely very high profile/talked about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
> One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion…
NeXT? But yes, I completely get what you’re saying, I just couldn’t resist. It was an amazingly long sighted strategic move, for sure.
> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.
how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?
They bought Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2008 which is where all their ARM chip designs came from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.
cpu yes, but what about the rest of the iphone?
They design much more in house than any other smartphone brand, except maybe Samsung.
CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…
They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.
Arm exists, it is unknown how much tech apple gets from Arm.
Arm licenses their designs to everybody. They are okay, but you are never going to make market leading processors by using the Arm designs.
The M1 and M2 were beating the best-in-class i7 when they were relased IIRC
Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.
You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.
> Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.
More likely it was derived from PWRficient, or a clean sheet design that took lessons from it.
It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive
Apple has an architectural license that lets them build their own ARM cores:
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...
It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.
Yep, Apple was a significant early investor in ARM. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...
The thing about Apple having a “special license” due to being a partial founder of Arm is an urban legend. They have an architectural license, just like several other companies making custom Arm CPUs do.
Yeah, why would ARM prevent other companies from paying more for the better license?
All they care about is that companies buy an ARM license, not that they use the boilerplate ARM CPU design.
Those designs are there to make it easier for companies to make ARM-based chips who would otherwise never be able to design their own.
And tsmc (and therefore asml etc), usually apple reserves the newest upcoming node for their own production.
Besides Apple's SoCs they also have made dedicated silicon for secure enclaves, wifi, bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and cellular radios, and motion coprocessors.
Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.
Were they ARM investors at the time they needed CPU for Newton? Was that before or after e.g. iPaq PDA-s? And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?
I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sleeve", that the iPaq slid into, not the other way around. Could run the ASR engine for about whole 10 mins before it drained the battery flat, haha. :-)
IIRC Apple originally invested in ARM during the development of the Newton. The original Newtons used ARM 610 CPUs. I don't know exactly when they sold their ARM stake but they kept their architecture license.
The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.
what about all the components and sensors
Apple has bought startups with various technologies like Anobit, that developed advanced flash memory controllers, and have funded development efforts by partners. For example Apple worked hand in glove with Sharp to develop the tech for their 5K display panels. They also now have their own cellular chip designs in some models, in their quest for independence from Qualcomm. That’s all from memory, I’m sure there are many more examples.
I vaguely remember Intel tried to get into the low power / smartphone / table space at the time with their Atom line [0] in the late 00's, but due to core architecture issues they could never reach the efficiency of ARM based chips.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom
I don't think it was core architecture issues. My impression is that over the years their efforts to get into low-power devices never got the full force of their engineering prowess.
I worked for an IP vendor that was in some Atom SoCs (over a decade ago now though) - from what I remember the perf/w was actually pretty competitive for contemporary ARM devices when we supplied the IP, but then took so long to actually end up in products it ended up behind others - other customers were already on the next generation by that point, even if the initial projects started at about the same time. And the atoms were buggy as hell, never had more problems with dumb cache/fabric/memory controller issues.
To me the Atom team always felt like a dead-end inside intel - everyone seemed to be trying to get in to a different higher-status team ASAP - our engineering contacts often changed monthly, if we even knew who our "contacts" were meant to be at any time. I think any product developed like that would struggle.
I thought they just acquired P.A. Semi, job done.
When they bought PA Semi the company worked on IBM Power architecture chips. It was very much the team Apple was after, not any one particular technology.
that was a part of it, yes.
but do not forget how focused they (amd/intel, esp in opteron days -- edit) were on the server market.
I don't think it is so much efficiency of their chips for their hardware (phones) so much as efficiency of their OS for their chips and hardware design (like unified memory).
It is likely the hardware effiency of their chips. Apple SoCs running industry-standard benchmarks still run very cool, yet still show dominant performance. The OS efficiency helps, but even under extreme stress tests like SPEC, the Apple SoCs dominate in perf & power.
See Lunar Lake on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM versus the M3 on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM: https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q?t=531
The 258V (TSMC N3B) has a worse perf / W 1T curve than the Apple M1 (TSMC N5).
> It is likely the hardware effiency of their chips. Apple SoCs running industry-standard benchmarks still run very cool, yet still show dominant performance
Dieselgate?
I have heard that Apple Silicon chips are designed around the retain-release cycle that goes back to NeXT and is still here today (hidden by ARC compilation), but I don't think that's the whole story. Back when the M1's came out, many benchmarks showed virtualized Windows blowing the doors off of market-equivalent x86 CPUs.
Also, there's the obvious benefits of being TSMC's best customer. And when you design a chip for low power consumption, that means you've got a higher ceiling when you introduce cooling.
The SoC benefits are being ignored by some people here. Apple doesn't control every piece of software as some here posit, however, OS optimizations and utilization of extra-efficiency cores (though still requiring SoC design they do also need specific OS code support) are part of the performance.
Textbook Innovator’s Dilemma.
> A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone.
No, the main reason for better battery life is the RISC architecture. PC on ARM architecture has the same gains.
Any downvoters care to actually leave me a reply telling me why?
Im not wrong!
Because it’s a take thst sounds like someone who has been reading comp.sys.mac.advocacy from 1995 when the PPC vs x86 wars were going on (and when PPC chips were already behind in performance) up through 2005 when Apple gave up and went to Intel.