Hacker News Reader

Comment by lp4vn | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me how Apple managed to come from nowhere with a chip(M Series) that's competitive with the best chips from two companies(AMD and Intel) that have operated for decades exclusively in this field?

Shouldn't AMD and Intel have an expertise that ideally would take decades and billions to be reached?

View on HN

Apple had been building its own mobile chips for a long time before releasing the m series. Their semi products absolutely did not come out of nowhere.

By purchasing expertise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

This was the team that did the Digital Alpha & StrongARM.

and Montalvo, Intrincity, and probably more I don't know about.

As always "the overnight success were years in the making".

And they've done so much hiring since the PASemi acquisition that probably every much CPU designed in the last 20 years is well represented on the Apple team.

Thank you !

It wasn't nowhere. M1 was based on A14. It's called A14 because it's the 14th generation Apple Silicon chip (although the early generations were designed by Samsung so maybe it's Apple's 10th generation chip design).

In addition to what sibling comments already mentioned, also be aware that Apple was one of founding companies of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd (the company that became Arm Holdings plc), together Acorn Computers (which was the original A in ARM) and VLSI Technology.

This was back in 1990.

Before they switched to Intel x86, they were also involved in PowerPC, together with IBM and Motorola.

So they are not coming from nowhere by any means.

You’re just seeing generalized platforms with history cruft vs walled garden controlled platforms.

A program built for an intel and amd cpu 30 years ago runs today. That’s not true of M series.

ARM64 and AMD64 are contemporaneous redesigns of the underlying architecture that got rid of a lot of cruft, so being ARM does not have an advantage there. One could argue that the more relaxed memory model of ARM gives a slight advantage, but that's a mixed bag.

Even without that, all modern chips translate the ISA into internal ops, and that translation take such a miniscule fraction of chip area that ISA in 2024 has minimal effect on power and performance.

Apple had a least a decade of experience designing chips for the iPhones/iPads etc. Oh and yes, they spent billions of $ on R&D for those as well.

In addition to the other points made here, it's well-known that Apple poached a lot of engineering talent from Intel and AMD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com