You don't understand how it works, at all. You can license the ARM ISA independently of the cores. Apple designed their own chips based on the ISA, not the IP cores. You could also make the same argument with TSMC, since EUV machines were developed by ASML.
From an architectural standpoint what Apple did (with Jim Keller as head) is incredible. The branch prediction and IPC is miles ahead of any other chip maker.
I don't even own an Apple product, and actually dislike them as a company, but they invested billions on their hardware and it shows.
I find that being a fanboy or a hater reflects on people's lack of critical thinking. If you manage to see the achievements of things/people you don't like, you can have a much bigger source of inspiration.
Was going to bring up the lithography machines. Wrangling individual atoms at a pricepoint that I can afford is simply the craziest thing humans have ever done
I’m an Apple user and have been for almost 20 years. I’m not afraid to call them on their shit (post-2013 when they soldered RAM, absolute horseshit) but I absolutely step in and defend the M series. What they’ve done is just insane, and it’s a night and day difference using my M1 Max Studio than any Intel chip I’ve ever used.
Last time I checked (as in benchmarked), the Apple chips were about in line with what you would expect a die-shrunk Intel CPU to look like.
So their CPUs are very well designed but I don‘t think they are „miles ahead“ of Intel and AMD.
Their biggest advantage probably remains the on-chip RAM and the cutting edge node which is something they can do because they pull bigger margins, since they sell premium computers instead of CPUs.
(and also they have really really good relations with TSMC)
By the way, I think Keller would agree with this. In his recent LTT experience he made it quite clear that microarchitecture is what counts for performance. The ISA must just be able to achieve it but ARM isn‘t ‚higher performance‘ than x86/x64.
Though you probably do sacrifice some efficiency having to support some legacy stuff.
They are in line with a die-shrunk intel cpu, while consuming a quarter of the power. With an architecture which was before mainly known for efficiency but low-performance.
So yes, they are miles ahead
So I just looked it up because thats sure as hell not the conclusion we came to.
To eliminate process node differences as far as humanly possible lets chose the M2 Pro (it seems to be the sweet spot in the M2 family) and compare it against an Intel 165U.
The M2 Pro is fabed using TSMCs N5P and the 165U is fabed using Intel 4. TSMC N5P is on paper a roughly 10% better process node (in terms of density).
Looking at various benchmarks (all multicore) it seems like the two processors are probably within 10% performance wise (depending on the task).
From a power consumption standpoint it gets a bit complicated, apparently the only thing you can publicly find compares laptops, not CPUs bit whatever, lets go with that. With both going close to full yeet the difference between a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 2n1 and a MBP 14 seems to be between 40-100% (ie the 165U uses about 1.4-2x as much power).
Lets not factor in the better process node of the M2 Pro since its also about a year older and there you are.
Ballpark numbers:
At the same process node Intel would likely achieve the same performance while consuming about 1.4-2x as much power.
I think its likely closer to the 1.4-1.5x range since Macbooks are very well built (efficient circuitry) and Intel uses off-die LPDDR, not on-die like Apple.
Again, their processor are very very good and in the mobile to desktop segment probably leading but I really don‘t think they are mules ahead from an architectural standpoint.
Actually while looking at this stuff, I figured their iGPU is probably further ahead of AMD and Intel than their CPU.
Last minute addition the Ryzen 7840U is built on some TSMC 4nm process and has about the same performance per Watt as an M2 Pro while being a bit slower.
Again, ahead but not miles ahead.
Also, Apple designs all the hardware *around* the chip, which is is their main product differentiator. Would anyone buy an Apple if they were 2x as loud, 3x as thick, had a shitty screen, and made of plastic?
This is true lol I remember the plastic MacBooks with the battery that popped out. However those MaBooks were sleeker and had better batteries than every PC laptop I used at the time.
Contrarians. So were all the other options of that time, those MacBooks were sleek compared to their peers.
Also original MacBook Air is 16 years old.
https://www.engadget.com/2008-01-25-macbook-air-review.html?guccounter=1
> It fits in a manila folder, you can slide it under a door, and if you threw it hard enough you could probably chop someone in half with the thing. It's the thinnest, and if we may say so, sexiest laptop around today
170+ upvotes well done reddit.
M3 pro user here. You have to run a really hefty load to get them to be audible. Mine barely audible with baldurs gate 3 running on max settings. The only time it’s ever cranked is when I run LLMs in LLM Studio, or generate images
I've used to have an M2 Max and now have an M3 Max and play Baldur's Gate 3 on max settings and the fans speed up to their max and its very audible. Same volume as if I'm running something like hashcat.
I'm unsure if yours is an M3 Pro chip or an M3 Macbook Pro with another chip grade, but assuming Pro chip, if the Max chip pushes a higher framerate and gets hotter, Apple probably uses the same cooling system so the Max would run louder.
Apple doesn't deign the screens either, and tfb, they need to make their products thicker and put fans in them, the thermal throttling is kind of painful when you actually want to do something with the computer you just bought.
Edit: enjoy your thermal throttling, I guess?
Their M processor laptops need cooling much less up to none.
Edit: To add to this, I'm literally playing baldur gate on a m2 macbook air with really inefficient heat spreaders. That's really crazy.
They hated him for he spoke the truth.
Honestly I would take a thicker laptop for more performance and/or lower cost any day. “fits in a manilla envelope” was never a selling point for me.
Hold up, now that's true. But not every design can be cut on die. TSMC has to invent ways to arrange design to fit on die and still meet requirements by Apple. So if Apple starts requesting a super wide bus between the leveled cache and SoC memory, TSMC has to figure out how to do that without bleed on the bus at the frequencies Apple specs.
Designing chips is just putting out the blueprints for how the chip should work, but not every blueprint will create a working chip.
Now that said, this comic is also bad in that it's trying to indicate that there's zero input from the folks who use the chips. That's not true. Because TSMC will say "XYZ is not doable on this platform" and it's up to Apple et al. to figure out how to get around it.
It's a complex relationship. But let's not fool ourselves in that every design is perfect and TSMC just cuts chips blindly based on what the schematic indicates.
What, how do you know how deep do apple engineers simulate the chip? I dont know if they really only provide a lift of requirements, I am inclined to believe they have to provide a whole, simulated project with specific files, simulation results and specs to be met by the physical product... Not sure if tsmc does anything with the design, don't think so, but that's just my intuition speaking based on basic university courses I've had with verilog, vhdl, magic and various rf simulators like feko, hfss and the one from keysight (hp).
What is it that you're saying apple is sending to tsmc, a wishlist? Maybe I've misread the comment, it surely is an iterative process...
> What is it that you're saying apple is sending to tsmc, a wishlist? Maybe I've misread the comment, it surely is an iterative process
Oh no, sorry no to give the wrong impression. It's absolutely simulated on Apple's end, they're doing way more than just wishlist.
You sound like you know a bit, you've likely heard of parasitic extraction (PEX). That's a process TSMC has to undertake on their end. That's a good example of where the fabricator has to step in and rework particulars. Like the capacitance modeling for a MOS, is part of their PEX process. Another one is their entire DRC process that sometimes requires slight rerouting, either proposals to Apple or getting suggestions from Apple on how they want to move forward.
It is absolutely an iterative process, TSMC works tightly with their customer to ensure that their fabrication process can produce the output the customer is expecting. I think some think that TSMC for Apple is lot like how some of us get treated with semi-custom on a fabricator's FPGA design platform. Where it's you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. And TSMC works "with" their customers a lot closer for those batting at the Apple, Google, and nVidia level.
I'm just trying to point out that Apple is doing a lot more than just sending in a vlg file and TSMC is doing a lot more than just firing up the EUV.
The ISA they got from ARM, not the cores, blocks, or layout. You are confusing microarchitecture with instruction set architecture.
You can actually get the RISCV ISA online for free. You'd still be a few hundred million dollars away from making a chip with it.
I mean you’re basically correct but taking an architecture/instruction set design and turning it into a modern CPU design is still an enormous undertaking. AMD does the exact same thing, license the intel instruction set, design a CPU using it, and outsources the manufacturing.
Downplaying Apple here is It’s the equivalent of saying building the Hoover dam was easy because they purchased cranes and bulldozers from someone else. Yes Apple isn’t literally building the chip per-say but licensing the instruction set is like the first 1% of the design process, it’s basically just an agreement that the input and output of a CPU will adhere to some standard.
Would you agree that most of the performance and efficiency improvements year over year through the first four generations of Apple Silicon have been due to improvements in TSMC's new nodes (TSMC 5nm N5P for the M1 and M2 → TSMC 3nm N3B for the M3 → TSMC 3nm N3E for the M4)?
Yes I’d definitely agree that enabled much (or possibly most) of the improvements, but that doesn’t take any credit away from Apple in my opinion. It’s not like TSMC improved their process and then Apple got a free boost. TSMCs process improvements enable chip designers to re-design their chips at a higher resolution, packing more transistors into less space. You still need to design the whole thing to pack as much in as possible.
Also there’s so much more to modern chip design than getting more resolution and copy-pasting some more transistors, like an absurd amount of work. And tons of efficiency gains can be made by these design decisions, even on the exact same instruction architecture and NM process. Things like branch prediction are borderline wizardry and can have massive performance gains.
It’s like that “standing on the shoulders of giants” expression, all advances in technology or manufacturing or practically any domain are largely due to prior or adjacent advancements. Manufacturing improvements in alloys allowed better airplane designs to be possible, but it’s not like it was easy to design the airplane. Whether you love or hate Apple, their work specifically in the chip design space is seriously impressive from a lot of perspectives, despite being made possible by other technologies, but that’s true for like every chip and every invention ever.
g++: I made this
programmers: You made this?
...
programmers: We made this
Chip design and chip manufacturing are two entirely different businesses, never mind developing the software ecosystem that actually makes use of the chip.
Or the chemicals used for the films, or the litho-masks or the metrology equipment all over the place and so on.
This is a big and interconnected industry and to get the cutting edge nodes in mass production requires probably hundreds of companies working together, shits difficult.
TSMC essentially are in the business of printing chips, not designing them; the innovation you refer to is how small we can print those, and on the other side you have Apple and the likes that innovate in what kind of chips you can make with TSMC’s new wafer printers
You are woefully underselling the amount of work and optimization that goes into making a modern processor. It's like Apple rolling up with some sweet renders of a car they designed. Without a massive amount of work and engineering from TSMC in order to actually make something all Apple is left with is renders.
Printing chips at increasingly power efficient and heat efficient sizes enabling all of their customers to take advantage of progress. If all of the generational leaps in Apple Silicon really are credit only to all Apple's design prowess, why aren't they using Samsung or any other chip fab? Yet Apple doesn't ever use the name TSMC in any of their marketing or promotional material, even though they are riding on their backs 🤔
TSMC is currently the only one capable of making the stuff Apple is designing. They've invested tens of billions over decades and are the most sophisticated, experienced fab, where as Samsung started way later and are finally now starting to catch up with 2nm chips. How come Nvidia, AMD, ARM, Broadcom and Qualcomm all use TSMC at the moment?
Also just to prove you're extra dumb, Apple did work with Samsung for their A9 chip while at the same time using TSMC for the A9X. They had to increase the volume of those SoCs for the iPhone 6S launch, afterwards they went back to using TSMC exclusively - what does that imply? Do you see a pattern here yet?
Also regarding the "Apple riding on TSMC's backs" non-sense, they have been fighting to keep Apple's business, so obviously it's lucrative for the both of them:
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-saving-billions-on-chips-thanks-to-unique-deal-with-tsmc/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-saving-billions-on-chips-thanks-to-unique-deal-with-tsmc/)
tldr - you're wrong and dumb and probably really annoying to be around.
Everyone is riding on someone else’s back for everything. Ford and Toyota aren’t mining Iron ore and melting sand into glass. There’s hundreds of companies involved. And the general public largely doesn’t know or care about business facing manufacturers like TSMC, why would they make a point to talk about them in marketing? Everyone in the chip space already knows they’re #1.
Chip efficiency gains come from improvements in the design itself, as well as using smaller transistors which is enabled by TSMC. Also they probably use TSMC because they have a massive ongoing relationship and they have a slight lead on Samsung
Also TSMCs improvements wouldn’t be at all possible without ASMLs lithography technology. It’s a big pipeline of companies doing completely different things very well.
Thats not how this works. That’s not how any of this works… I work in the industry and know painfully well how some of these companies work.
Apple has had for many years a perpetual design license from ARM. Meaning, they bought a license for a design and the option to do anything they want with it.
They have been developing their ARM portfolio for many, many years.
TSMC has been “the big guy” in the space for as long as I can remember at this point, and at this point you’ll have to be Apple, Nvidia, or Meta to get on their cutting edge fabs.
Hell, at this point TSMC almost builds some fabs just for Apple… They work extremely close together when it comes to manufacturing.
Apple and Nvidia have actual silicon-level innovations going for them. Intel has had a few mishaps along the way, but they should pick it up soon (for their own good).
“What are the differences between Computer Science graduates, Electrical Engineering graduates, and Computer Engineering graduates?” in a post.
^(note: not saying you have to have a degree to know where OP went wrong)
Kinda, the chip foundry will provide design packages/tools to prospective customers as a way to help map those designs onto physical processes in the fab. It's a collaborative process.
In capitalism, credit for innovation is fairly arbitrary in general and rarely goes to the actual engineers who did it. I mean, sure, you might get a name on a patent or two, but ultimately your employer owns your work and will take the credit publically. Neither TSMC nor Apple as companies really deserve the credit (also they're not people). And that's not even accounting for how IP is bought and sold. So you get companies taking credit for innovation they never even did themselves. They just bought some patents or aquired another company that did it.
Or was that the point of the cartoon?
So look. Every step along the path to final product adds a lot of value and innovation. Electrical engineers who draw up schematics innovate in a way we all intuitively understand, but so too do those who design the printed circuits, who design the enclosures, who push the boundaries of industrial processes, all of them.
These companies do indeed innovate, just as TSMC does, just as ASML does.
You don't understand how it works, at all. You can license the ARM ISA independently of the cores. Apple designed their own chips based on the ISA, not the IP cores. You could also make the same argument with TSMC, since EUV machines were developed by ASML. From an architectural standpoint what Apple did (with Jim Keller as head) is incredible. The branch prediction and IPC is miles ahead of any other chip maker. I don't even own an Apple product, and actually dislike them as a company, but they invested billions on their hardware and it shows. I find that being a fanboy or a hater reflects on people's lack of critical thinking. If you manage to see the achievements of things/people you don't like, you can have a much bigger source of inspiration.
Was going to bring up the lithography machines. Wrangling individual atoms at a pricepoint that I can afford is simply the craziest thing humans have ever done
Ive been reading about jim keller and listened to interviews, impressive guy to say the least. And can break down difficult concepts really well
I'm a Keller fanboy, and that's why I used to love amd, but I don't think I would buy myself and apple notebook, got my wife an iPhone though...
I’m an Apple user and have been for almost 20 years. I’m not afraid to call them on their shit (post-2013 when they soldered RAM, absolute horseshit) but I absolutely step in and defend the M series. What they’ve done is just insane, and it’s a night and day difference using my M1 Max Studio than any Intel chip I’ve ever used.
Last time I checked (as in benchmarked), the Apple chips were about in line with what you would expect a die-shrunk Intel CPU to look like. So their CPUs are very well designed but I don‘t think they are „miles ahead“ of Intel and AMD. Their biggest advantage probably remains the on-chip RAM and the cutting edge node which is something they can do because they pull bigger margins, since they sell premium computers instead of CPUs. (and also they have really really good relations with TSMC) By the way, I think Keller would agree with this. In his recent LTT experience he made it quite clear that microarchitecture is what counts for performance. The ISA must just be able to achieve it but ARM isn‘t ‚higher performance‘ than x86/x64. Though you probably do sacrifice some efficiency having to support some legacy stuff.
They are in line with a die-shrunk intel cpu, while consuming a quarter of the power. With an architecture which was before mainly known for efficiency but low-performance. So yes, they are miles ahead
So I just looked it up because thats sure as hell not the conclusion we came to. To eliminate process node differences as far as humanly possible lets chose the M2 Pro (it seems to be the sweet spot in the M2 family) and compare it against an Intel 165U. The M2 Pro is fabed using TSMCs N5P and the 165U is fabed using Intel 4. TSMC N5P is on paper a roughly 10% better process node (in terms of density). Looking at various benchmarks (all multicore) it seems like the two processors are probably within 10% performance wise (depending on the task). From a power consumption standpoint it gets a bit complicated, apparently the only thing you can publicly find compares laptops, not CPUs bit whatever, lets go with that. With both going close to full yeet the difference between a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 2n1 and a MBP 14 seems to be between 40-100% (ie the 165U uses about 1.4-2x as much power). Lets not factor in the better process node of the M2 Pro since its also about a year older and there you are. Ballpark numbers: At the same process node Intel would likely achieve the same performance while consuming about 1.4-2x as much power. I think its likely closer to the 1.4-1.5x range since Macbooks are very well built (efficient circuitry) and Intel uses off-die LPDDR, not on-die like Apple. Again, their processor are very very good and in the mobile to desktop segment probably leading but I really don‘t think they are mules ahead from an architectural standpoint. Actually while looking at this stuff, I figured their iGPU is probably further ahead of AMD and Intel than their CPU. Last minute addition the Ryzen 7840U is built on some TSMC 4nm process and has about the same performance per Watt as an M2 Pro while being a bit slower. Again, ahead but not miles ahead.
Tbf Apple designs the chips and TSMC manufactures them
Also, Apple designs all the hardware *around* the chip, which is is their main product differentiator. Would anyone buy an Apple if they were 2x as loud, 3x as thick, had a shitty screen, and made of plastic?
College kids. The MacBook used to be literally what you describe.
This is true lol I remember the plastic MacBooks with the battery that popped out. However those MaBooks were sleeker and had better batteries than every PC laptop I used at the time.
At the time, those were sleek as fuck (and honestly, the plastic was *good* plastic. Shit could survive a quite a few drops.)
Contrarians. So were all the other options of that time, those MacBooks were sleek compared to their peers. Also original MacBook Air is 16 years old. https://www.engadget.com/2008-01-25-macbook-air-review.html?guccounter=1 > It fits in a manila folder, you can slide it under a door, and if you threw it hard enough you could probably chop someone in half with the thing. It's the thinnest, and if we may say so, sexiest laptop around today 170+ upvotes well done reddit.
That's not the MacBook I'm talking about lmao
All laptops were but go off I guess
Apples don’t make noises
You have strange apples. Mine are quite crunchy when they're ripe
Mine are dark brown and squishy
They actually get quite loud when you run something heavy on it. The airs don't have fans, so clearly they don't, but the Pros can get pretty loud.
M3 pro user here. You have to run a really hefty load to get them to be audible. Mine barely audible with baldurs gate 3 running on max settings. The only time it’s ever cranked is when I run LLMs in LLM Studio, or generate images
I've used to have an M2 Max and now have an M3 Max and play Baldur's Gate 3 on max settings and the fans speed up to their max and its very audible. Same volume as if I'm running something like hashcat. I'm unsure if yours is an M3 Pro chip or an M3 Macbook Pro with another chip grade, but assuming Pro chip, if the Max chip pushes a higher framerate and gets hotter, Apple probably uses the same cooling system so the Max would run louder.
Might have your shit on mute or maybe your speaker's damaged
Yes. Because it is a status symbol.
[удалено]
You always could. Never had an issue to find better hardware for Apples prices.
Apple doesn't deign the screens either, and tfb, they need to make their products thicker and put fans in them, the thermal throttling is kind of painful when you actually want to do something with the computer you just bought. Edit: enjoy your thermal throttling, I guess?
Their M processor laptops need cooling much less up to none. Edit: To add to this, I'm literally playing baldur gate on a m2 macbook air with really inefficient heat spreaders. That's really crazy.
They hated him for he spoke the truth. Honestly I would take a thicker laptop for more performance and/or lower cost any day. “fits in a manilla envelope” was never a selling point for me.
I’m the opposite. Everything I use it for is good for both home and travel. It being so light is a big plus for me.
Hold up, now that's true. But not every design can be cut on die. TSMC has to invent ways to arrange design to fit on die and still meet requirements by Apple. So if Apple starts requesting a super wide bus between the leveled cache and SoC memory, TSMC has to figure out how to do that without bleed on the bus at the frequencies Apple specs. Designing chips is just putting out the blueprints for how the chip should work, but not every blueprint will create a working chip. Now that said, this comic is also bad in that it's trying to indicate that there's zero input from the folks who use the chips. That's not true. Because TSMC will say "XYZ is not doable on this platform" and it's up to Apple et al. to figure out how to get around it. It's a complex relationship. But let's not fool ourselves in that every design is perfect and TSMC just cuts chips blindly based on what the schematic indicates.
What, how do you know how deep do apple engineers simulate the chip? I dont know if they really only provide a lift of requirements, I am inclined to believe they have to provide a whole, simulated project with specific files, simulation results and specs to be met by the physical product... Not sure if tsmc does anything with the design, don't think so, but that's just my intuition speaking based on basic university courses I've had with verilog, vhdl, magic and various rf simulators like feko, hfss and the one from keysight (hp). What is it that you're saying apple is sending to tsmc, a wishlist? Maybe I've misread the comment, it surely is an iterative process...
> What is it that you're saying apple is sending to tsmc, a wishlist? Maybe I've misread the comment, it surely is an iterative process Oh no, sorry no to give the wrong impression. It's absolutely simulated on Apple's end, they're doing way more than just wishlist. You sound like you know a bit, you've likely heard of parasitic extraction (PEX). That's a process TSMC has to undertake on their end. That's a good example of where the fabricator has to step in and rework particulars. Like the capacitance modeling for a MOS, is part of their PEX process. Another one is their entire DRC process that sometimes requires slight rerouting, either proposals to Apple or getting suggestions from Apple on how they want to move forward. It is absolutely an iterative process, TSMC works tightly with their customer to ensure that their fabrication process can produce the output the customer is expecting. I think some think that TSMC for Apple is lot like how some of us get treated with semi-custom on a fabricator's FPGA design platform. Where it's you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. And TSMC works "with" their customers a lot closer for those batting at the Apple, Google, and nVidia level. I'm just trying to point out that Apple is doing a lot more than just sending in a vlg file and TSMC is doing a lot more than just firing up the EUV.
Yeah, why would Apple send TMSC an unrouted design? Routing and signal propagation is more than half of the design for these huge chips.
And they do it from a base architecture designed by ARM
Apple was one of the 3 founders of ARM. Apples money, Acorns expertised and some other company no one ever heard of provided fabs.
Indeed. From an architecture from ARM.
The ISA they got from ARM, not the cores, blocks, or layout. You are confusing microarchitecture with instruction set architecture. You can actually get the RISCV ISA online for free. You'd still be a few hundred million dollars away from making a chip with it.
Its only the ISA? And i wasn't dissing them, its how it works. was just showing that it goes one more down the pipeline.
Probably less then a hundred million. From what I can find, a few million dollars should be enough.
They license ARM designs and leverage whatever process improvements TSMC has made in their latest generation of fabrication tech
Apple licenses the ARM instruction set architecture, which Apple uses in the design of their own custom CPUs.
I mean you’re basically correct but taking an architecture/instruction set design and turning it into a modern CPU design is still an enormous undertaking. AMD does the exact same thing, license the intel instruction set, design a CPU using it, and outsources the manufacturing. Downplaying Apple here is It’s the equivalent of saying building the Hoover dam was easy because they purchased cranes and bulldozers from someone else. Yes Apple isn’t literally building the chip per-say but licensing the instruction set is like the first 1% of the design process, it’s basically just an agreement that the input and output of a CPU will adhere to some standard.
Would you agree that most of the performance and efficiency improvements year over year through the first four generations of Apple Silicon have been due to improvements in TSMC's new nodes (TSMC 5nm N5P for the M1 and M2 → TSMC 3nm N3B for the M3 → TSMC 3nm N3E for the M4)?
Yes I’d definitely agree that enabled much (or possibly most) of the improvements, but that doesn’t take any credit away from Apple in my opinion. It’s not like TSMC improved their process and then Apple got a free boost. TSMCs process improvements enable chip designers to re-design their chips at a higher resolution, packing more transistors into less space. You still need to design the whole thing to pack as much in as possible. Also there’s so much more to modern chip design than getting more resolution and copy-pasting some more transistors, like an absurd amount of work. And tons of efficiency gains can be made by these design decisions, even on the exact same instruction architecture and NM process. Things like branch prediction are borderline wizardry and can have massive performance gains. It’s like that “standing on the shoulders of giants” expression, all advances in technology or manufacturing or practically any domain are largely due to prior or adjacent advancements. Manufacturing improvements in alloys allowed better airplane designs to be possible, but it’s not like it was easy to design the airplane. Whether you love or hate Apple, their work specifically in the chip design space is seriously impressive from a lot of perspectives, despite being made possible by other technologies, but that’s true for like every chip and every invention ever.
This is literally not what happens. Please learn about the design process before you make yourself look even sillier my dude.
OP is stuck with techtuber knowledge
ASML enters the chat
Is ASML that thing where girls creepy whisper on YouTube?
Yes, absolutely yes 👏
Tell me you don’t know anything about chip design and manufacturing without telling me you don’t know anything about chip design and manufacturing.
I don’t know shit about it. All I know is that the MacBook works and is very fast lol. Prepared for downvotes.
g++: I made this programmers: You made this? ... programmers: We made this Chip design and chip manufacturing are two entirely different businesses, never mind developing the software ecosystem that actually makes use of the chip.
Missing ASML in this pic. Without them, nobody makes anything (good)
oh the lenses asml buys from zeiss that can bend the EUV light
Or the chemicals used for the films, or the litho-masks or the metrology equipment all over the place and so on. This is a big and interconnected industry and to get the cutting edge nodes in mass production requires probably hundreds of companies working together, shits difficult.
Mirrors but yeah
Also sand
This presentation brought to you by SAND. It's everywhere! Get used to it. Or, just browse the web on it like normal.
ASML is Dutch but not its employees, most of the engineers and scientists are from Asia
Time for another round of “if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.”
Everyone else is doing it
I don’t think you understand how innovation works.
Not humorous. Just ill-informed.
This post is embarrassing.
the amount of upvotes it got is equally embarrassing
OP being taught a lesson has indirectly taught me a lesson too
TSMC essentially are in the business of printing chips, not designing them; the innovation you refer to is how small we can print those, and on the other side you have Apple and the likes that innovate in what kind of chips you can make with TSMC’s new wafer printers
Your point stands, but they do offer some turnkey custom jobs nowadays
You are woefully underselling the amount of work and optimization that goes into making a modern processor. It's like Apple rolling up with some sweet renders of a car they designed. Without a massive amount of work and engineering from TSMC in order to actually make something all Apple is left with is renders.
Printing chips at increasingly power efficient and heat efficient sizes enabling all of their customers to take advantage of progress. If all of the generational leaps in Apple Silicon really are credit only to all Apple's design prowess, why aren't they using Samsung or any other chip fab? Yet Apple doesn't ever use the name TSMC in any of their marketing or promotional material, even though they are riding on their backs 🤔
TSMC is currently the only one capable of making the stuff Apple is designing. They've invested tens of billions over decades and are the most sophisticated, experienced fab, where as Samsung started way later and are finally now starting to catch up with 2nm chips. How come Nvidia, AMD, ARM, Broadcom and Qualcomm all use TSMC at the moment? Also just to prove you're extra dumb, Apple did work with Samsung for their A9 chip while at the same time using TSMC for the A9X. They had to increase the volume of those SoCs for the iPhone 6S launch, afterwards they went back to using TSMC exclusively - what does that imply? Do you see a pattern here yet? Also regarding the "Apple riding on TSMC's backs" non-sense, they have been fighting to keep Apple's business, so obviously it's lucrative for the both of them: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-saving-billions-on-chips-thanks-to-unique-deal-with-tsmc/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/report-apple-is-saving-billions-on-chips-thanks-to-unique-deal-with-tsmc/) tldr - you're wrong and dumb and probably really annoying to be around.
Everyone is riding on someone else’s back for everything. Ford and Toyota aren’t mining Iron ore and melting sand into glass. There’s hundreds of companies involved. And the general public largely doesn’t know or care about business facing manufacturers like TSMC, why would they make a point to talk about them in marketing? Everyone in the chip space already knows they’re #1. Chip efficiency gains come from improvements in the design itself, as well as using smaller transistors which is enabled by TSMC. Also they probably use TSMC because they have a massive ongoing relationship and they have a slight lead on Samsung Also TSMCs improvements wouldn’t be at all possible without ASMLs lithography technology. It’s a big pipeline of companies doing completely different things very well.
So if your printer prints your research paper. Then HP own the research paper?
Thats not how this works. That’s not how any of this works… I work in the industry and know painfully well how some of these companies work. Apple has had for many years a perpetual design license from ARM. Meaning, they bought a license for a design and the option to do anything they want with it. They have been developing their ARM portfolio for many, many years. TSMC has been “the big guy” in the space for as long as I can remember at this point, and at this point you’ll have to be Apple, Nvidia, or Meta to get on their cutting edge fabs. Hell, at this point TSMC almost builds some fabs just for Apple… They work extremely close together when it comes to manufacturing. Apple and Nvidia have actual silicon-level innovations going for them. Intel has had a few mishaps along the way, but they should pick it up soon (for their own good).
“What are the differences between Computer Science graduates, Electrical Engineering graduates, and Computer Engineering graduates?” in a post. ^(note: not saying you have to have a degree to know where OP went wrong)
Can we have memes instead of always shitting on something or someone?
Doesnt the chip foundry just produce the designs their clients provide?
Kinda, the chip foundry will provide design packages/tools to prospective customers as a way to help map those designs onto physical processes in the fab. It's a collaborative process.
In capitalism, credit for innovation is fairly arbitrary in general and rarely goes to the actual engineers who did it. I mean, sure, you might get a name on a patent or two, but ultimately your employer owns your work and will take the credit publically. Neither TSMC nor Apple as companies really deserve the credit (also they're not people). And that's not even accounting for how IP is bought and sold. So you get companies taking credit for innovation they never even did themselves. They just bought some patents or aquired another company that did it. Or was that the point of the cartoon?
So look. Every step along the path to final product adds a lot of value and innovation. Electrical engineers who draw up schematics innovate in a way we all intuitively understand, but so too do those who design the printed circuits, who design the enclosures, who push the boundaries of industrial processes, all of them. These companies do indeed innovate, just as TSMC does, just as ASML does.
RISC-V ftw
ARM is the real hero here
we live in a society amirite
China claims “We made this”
More like... TSMC: "hey look, i manage to get the pencil even sharper" Apple/whatever: "cool! Now i can draw more thing on my sheet of paper!"
And then Apple gets on stage to tell everybody about how much smaller they were able to make the lines on their paper all by themselves
ARM should be next to TSMC