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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming

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Probably a decade or so. I imagine it was always a possibility, with steps being taken towards it over time, even if it wasn't a well defined goal yet. Requirement of uploading App Store apps as LLVM IR instead of machine code comes to mind.

>watching everyone on the internet complain

What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.

The M series is a continuation of the A series development that's been going since 2008 when they bought PA Semi, maybe earlier. The M1 could have been branded the A14X but for whatever reason they chose not to, probably to make better marketing buzz. I would guess they've been booting macOS on ARM in the lab since the A7 and after that just a long grind to get to a good enough user experience with sufficient app compatibility to switch. You can see stuff like TSO in the CPU showed up in earlier chips at least a couple years before the M1 launched.

AMD and Intel chips take ~5 years from starting work to being available to buy

The architecture is basically frozen 2 years before tapeout, which itself is a year before they go on sale.

Do you have a reference for that? 5 years is a pretty long time but I suppose it depends a lot on how one defines the start of a design.

Probably somewhere around two years before the M1 announcement is when development started.

It’s a lot of work to design one of these parts.

https://anysilicon.com/asic-design-flow-ultimate-guide/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2019/07/26/intel-...

Intel - 4 years.

When Linus Tech tips did a review and tear down of the last Intel MacBook Air the design had no heat pipe and was just passively cooled. The first MacBook Air with the M1 design was equivalent but with an updated motherboard that had an M1.

The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.

? My M1 MacBook Air is passively cooled, but has a heat pipe that feeds into a heat sink that's at least as large as the M1 system heat spreader.

- Detail image: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2020/11/19115445/MBA_M...

- iFixit Teardown feature article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...

It's just a big piece of copper with decent thermal mass, not heatpipe.

None of the Intel MacBook Airs were passively cooled. They all had fans.

There was a Macbook however that was passively cooled.

I loved that computer, and I hope they make another one of that size.

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