I hope Intel get their act together and start manufacturing ARM chips designed by Apple for Apple. Competition will push TSMC even harder to innovative faster to stay ahead.
Hmm, I wouldn't bet on it. Apple's chip designers are obviously great, but I bet a lot of their industry-leading performance/watt comes from being a node or two ahead of everyone else thanks to TSMC.
Bingo. Colocated RAM and the bespoke bridges are a massive part of this too, but buying out what is effectively the entire global capacity for a node is why Apple chips are where they are.
There are many factors that come together to make the M chips so efficient. The node is one. Another is full integration and optimization of all the systems together. Another is the inherent efficiency of ARM instruction decoding.
mort96|3 years ago
highwaylights|3 years ago
api|3 years ago
throwaway4good|3 years ago