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Comment by yywwbbn | Hacker News Reader

I keep wondering, did people always use the word ‘silicon’ when talking about CPUs & SoCs? Somehow I never noticed it before Apple released their ‘Apple Silicon’.

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Silicon as a term for semiconductors and the things we make from them is common in my experience. But I've never seen such a concerted effort to pronounce it "silly kin" as Apple Silicon marketing.

Just echoing what others are saying, no, we called them Intel chips/CPUs. What I don't get is why people go along with it. I personally prefer not being a miniature speakerphone for the marketing department at Apple.

In hardware circles I've seen CPUs/GPUs colloquially being referred to as "silicon" for at least a decade.

Which has very little to do with Apple PR, but everything with how CPUs/GPUs are overwhelmingly made from silicon.

This trends chart[1] suggests that "Apple silicon" is very much a marketing term versus a colloquial term for chips in general.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

This line of reasoning is just dumb. Every single chip on the mother board is made from Silicon. (There maybe some gallium or germanium parts but those are insignificant and irrelevant).

Hint: people posting on HN about how the M1/M2 are revolutionary are definitely not part of any hardware circles, and are using the marketing speak.

The original thread comment asked if this was a thing before "Apple Silicon", that's what I was referring to; I've seen it before, and not just years before but over a decade before, possibly even two decades.

As such it's not something Apple PR invented, but rather hijacked.

It used to be slang, though. Something you'd use to punch up the first paragraph of an article, not the way people actually talked. For some reason calling it "Apple Silicon" really grates on me, too. But such are the whims of megacorps.

LOL. Anyone who works in chip design would know much M1/M2 changed the hardware game. It is actually the dabbler enthusiast talking about how power/perf isn’t important because his LED-laden shitbox has a wall plug (muh absolute performance) that doesn’t grasp how utterly irrelevant DIY builders are in the market. Just look at the relative sales of servers, laptops and desktop and see what we care about.

Not a single second of thought is ever spent by the architects/designers on optimizing “absolute performance”. We only care about perf/area and perf/watt. It is the marketing teams that try to hype up gamer performance. Overclocking/high voltage performance requires the engineering knowledge of a freshman intern: go raise the voltage/freq, run the test program, make a SKU.

Source: worked on CPU/GPU arch/design for 20 years, including at Intel.

Cool story, but that's not the subject.

Intel fanboys whine about Apple/Intel CPU comparisons, here is their answer.

The takeaway from the story: connecting a bunch of shitty chiplets together makes a shitty SoC. Except this time, Intel paid TSMC a buttload of money to make their shitty design.

It's Apple marketing speak

Apple has very strong marketing, for example retina screens is marketing term for high DPI screens.

Yes, because those chips are made from silicon.

I mean they called the Bay Area, Silicon Valley because of the computer companies in the 70’s.

Yes, a lot of non-technical people now use that word. I remember using "silicon lottery" for as long as I'm building PCs.

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