TECH

Five years of apple silicon: how Apple continues to revolutionize chips

Apple Silicon has been in the fourth generation in five years.

We are crawling on the five-year anniversary of the apple silicone Tim Cook and for a fifth of servants. This is how the whole saga began, how she launched and what to expect in the future.

After many years of work with the restrictions on the Intel Apple chip, she introduced the transition to Apple Silicon during the WWDC 2020. The efforts to cancel the well-used architecture will see that Apple will go to the new line of the developed internal chips for their Catalog MacBook, starting from the same year.

This two -year transition from Intel to Apple Silicon began serious changes for the company, as well as the industry as a whole. In addition to claims to high efficiency structures in combination with a high level of performance that you expect from the launch of the chip.

Apple Silicon also presented the most promising function of the iPhone chips to the desktop. The addition of a neural engine to the M “M” Chips M “was forced the rest of the computing industry to consider the possibility of moving in similar ways using its own selection of the processor.

Apple General Director Tim Cook, introducing Apple Silicon during WWDC 2020, the lifting of loan: Apple

the chip basically followed the basic idea of ​​the processor with an integrated graphic graphic A processor that has been and remains a fairly ordinary concept during processing. The neural engine, of course, added more performance in tasks that could benefit from machine learning, but another change from the norm also helped.

Instead of using discrete memory bullets for CPU and a graphic processor, as well as other components, Apple decided to use a unified memory. It went against the usual concept, using one large memory pool to which all the processor elements could get.

The idea helped performance in several ways, including permission to components to access the same data in memory without the need to duplicate it.

there is also an advantage in the GPU that the more unified memory was turned on, the more memory it had access for graphic work. This allowed the GPU in Apple Silicon to have access to a much larger amount of memory than you could find in modern discrete graphic processors or video cards for PCs.

While the introduction of Apple Silicon at that time was focused on chips of the M1 and M series designed to use the MAC, this term has expanded in its use. Now it belongs to all the main processing chips of Apple, including its series A used in the iPhone and iPad lines, which were also predecessors for the M-series M.

Apple Silicon everywhere, this is not only processors, and this is not only in Mac. But in order to make things simple this time, we will discuss Apple Silicon from the original Mac-oriented point of view.

, but even just holding the MP series, the Progress Apple Silicon has reached a stunning and industry from the moment of its introduction.

Silicon from the preliminary phenomenon: troubles with Intel

Apple decision to make your own chips was related to the problems that were using the company.

In the 2010s, Intel was the main computational force. It was the status that he earned for years, but this is not the fact that the manufacturer of chips could maintain.

“There was no extremely difficult to continue to keep up with the Moore law” for Intel, due to the constant reduction of the matrix. Each new improvement in the process added new obstacles, while the subsequent contractions of the matrix continued to improve.

ultimately Intel rejected its known frequency of such a change in process change process (Tick), followed the update of architecture in this process (TOCK). Instead, by 2016, Intel switched to the Tick-tock strategy, linking the optimization phase at the end to get more from the process before it is reduced to the next.

inevitably, delays with shrinks of the matrix, such as the introduction of Intel 10-nanometer chips, were too large for Apple could deal.

This was only one of the problems that Apple faced Intel, and the heat created by chips and high energy consumption became great problems that increased. In 2018, this led to the issues of a thermal throttle affecting the updates of the MacBook Pro this year.

the throttle was serious enough to be a problem, and is aggravated by poor firmware. Consumers quickly gained popularity.

After our own testing, Mike Voerites from Appleinsider discussed the throttle on the new Leo Laporte screen.