As Moore’s Law slows, Apple is forced to use cheaper chipsets in non-pro iPhones
semianalysis.substack.com
semianalysis.substack.com
And then the A15 actually came out and Anandtech analysis showed it was a normal year for the A series chips, with reasonable, even impressive performance and efficiency gains year over year.
In other words, there's some interesting bits of information here since the guy does appear to have some level of supply chain / industry access, but any time he leans into his own analysis or editorial, I'd be skeptical.
"2018 was Apple’s last major step down in cost per transistor due to TSMC’s N10 to N7 process node shrink. With the transition from N7 to N5, the cost benefits were relatively small due to SRAM scaling issues. N7 is entering its 5th year of production, and N5 is now at its 3rd, yet the only hint of per wafer pricing changes have been in the wrong direction... Due to the way the 3 major DRAM companies have slowly increased output, cost per bit of DRAM has not really fallen."
Sophie Wilson (inventor of the original ARM instruction set) has been saying that cost-per-transistor has been rising for several years.
I've had several objections to previous comments that cost-per-transistor is rising, and I'm glad to see another confirmation.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...
https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-a15-die-shot-and-a...
I was calling out your analysis. You took the lower than usual IPC gains, and some departures for Nuvia, and surmised that Apple's engineering team must be on the decline and bleeding irreplaceable talent.
It wasn't a terribly unreasonable take given the information at the time before the A15 was even released to the public, but it was pre-mature and a bit hot. Hell that headline was blazing!
When the iPhone 13 actually released, we saw there was much more to the A15 than just pushing pure IPC--the focus for the design was clearly efficiency, and they frankly nailed it. It certainly does not look like the work of an in-decline, listless engineering team.
but CPUs themselves have been great for a long time. The A13 is the fastest CPU on the planet for rendering javascript (though not sure if faster than M1, as they probably have the same pedigree), so surely some of that CPU can be sacrificed.
It would be nicer to have a slower/more efficient CPU and a smaller phone.
That some people like big phones is a happy accident, or a genius marketing play, or both.
Maybe I'm wrong though.
So another part is the complete fiasco that are the mixed up, rarely overlapping, mm-wave 5G band definitions across the world meaning more discrete antennas are needed in each phone. Additionally the requirement for multiple antennas for each of these actual band for the higher frequencies because they have to beamform. And the power requirements for the frequency multipliers/etc and other frontend RF stuff for each set of these.
I think around the time of the iPhone 4 there was a bunch of hubbub from Apple about how bigger phones aren't as usable with one hand, so they weren't making them. Then they go and release the Max a few years later. :)
I think people regard phones in different ways, with the phone power users wanting a mini tablet, and other people wanting something much smaller. There is a significant contingent of people who practically live on their phone, so I can understand wanting a huge screen.
After he died, the "faster horse" contingent of Apple had a stronger voice.
My mother wants a big phone, "biggest that still fits in my purse" as she puts it. She isn't a power user, and she doesn't use the phone all that much, it's her iPad that she lives on. I think the reason big phones won out over small ones isn't because of some sneaky marketing push, it's because the largest part of the market wants big phones instead of tiny screens that fit in one hand.
It's similar to the car enthusiasts who insist a manual brown diesel wagon would sell well, but of course that's just the loudest 10 people on the Internet.
Everything else has been an optimization function - different sizes and colors to extract from all consumer price points... etc. Unfortunately I get the feeling the A/M series are a vertical integration decision first, followed by the Apple product mission.
The way you can tell the M/A processors are primarily optimizations is in the marketing and API improvements. Instead of trumpeting, write-once-run-everywhere, for iOS, iPad, and Mac, they tried in 2020 and it feel on deaf ears so they just gave it up - and now it's primarily a battery life discussion (longer lasting horse?)...
To me, the reason a developer can't understand the messaging is precisely because the device classes are intermingled (calling back to capturing the demand curve rather than building for a consumer purpose [the complicated question to parent's consumer preferences, with a Jobs required answer]) which complicates UI principles / code for developers. And really, a lot of apps are meant to live in each device class - not every one of them is a global life service - which Apple must get right if they are to do AR right.
I will concede though, as of today, the optimizations do appear to serve the customer in a 'just-as-good' fashion. So my critiques are only a 'maybe they left some on the table' - they are still the best, bar none.
Of course, the CPU would be larger and perhaps less power-efficient. Higher reliability also might not be a design goal, as there is no reason to outlive the term of software support.
All of the other SEs I would never consider, and the mini is likely EOL’d. Which is sad, because the mini is my favorite iPhone of all time.
Maybe they’ll bring the body back as an SE, but we likely won’t have a high-end small phone again.
If that was all there was to it, they could just bring back the "brick" form factor that was all the rage pre-smartphones, just with a smaller touchscreen.
I specifically bought an iPhone 13 Mini because its small form-factor, good specs and pretty decent battery life.
I imagine the SE will carry the mantle of the Mini going forward. That's fine with me, I've switched to upgrading my phone every 4-5 years anyway.
Whereas in the wider population the appeal of a full computer is more limited: people are more likely to throw cash at a bigger screen for better media consumption and gaming, and maybe have a cheap laptop for times where you really need a keyboard and desktop software.
I think you are underestimating how much people are using their phones for content creation. My daughter uses her phone for her entire video production pipeline. She records and edits videos, does compositing and animation, mixes audio, does photo editing etc. all on her iPhone.
I've tried several times to show her the advantages of using a 'real' computer with 'real' software, but she just finds it slow and annoying.
Sadly it seems like the 13mini will be the last one.
Guess it'll be pop-sockets for me from here on out!
Perhaps something like P-series for the "pro" model iPhones and a much smaller (transistor count, die size) lower power A-series for the main line. They could use the same core designs, similar to what they do with M1 and M1 Pro/Max.
The M2 will be using the same 4nm and uArch, GPU, NPU design from A16. ( I am hoping it would break the 2000 GB5 barrier ) And Apple will slowly rollout M2 on Mac over the course of next 18 months. Starting with Mac Pro first. The whole Mac Lineup are currently in huge demand, and if I remember correctly Tim Cook himself mentioned the Mac is breaking shipment record. One could extrapolate using sales data and I expect this to be something like 25M unit rather than the usual 18-20M unit. Apple wants to capture these market as soon as possible. Considering they could have lost a lot of Mac users over the last 3 - 4 years. ( They haven't updated the Active Mac user since 2018, some numbers just dont add up ).
Making sure they have enough capacity to feed whatever Mac sales they have. As some have reported they are still waiting for their October / November MacBook Pro Order.
> To be clear, the work is a proof of idea: The researchers haven’t meaningfully scaled the strategy. Fabricating a handful of transistors isn’t the identical as manufacturing billions on a chip and flawlessly making billions of these chips to be used in laptops and smartphones. Ren additionally factors out that 2D supplies, like molybdenum disulfide, are nonetheless dear and manufacturing high-quality stuff at scale is a problem.
Raises a question I've had for a while - is Moore's Law based on current production silicon or cutting edge research silicon that doesn't exist in consumer products yet?
The products in this article could be 5, 10, or 15 (or infinity) years away from large scale manufacturer. Do they count?
https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...
These "research" transistors have never had any bearing on the reality of economically manufacturing products. Here's a paper way back 50 years ago they were already making tiny transistors with electron beam processes https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5391506 - it would be about another 15 years before commercial chips were made with this transistor dimension, and that's 15 years at the height of Moore's law.
Not to say they don't inform what might be possible and advance knowledge of the physics, but it's not much of a predictor about what might become economically viable to make.