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Comment by skeezyboy | Hacker News Reader

> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.

how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?

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They bought Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2008 which is where all their ARM chip designs came from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

Besides Apple's SoCs they also have made dedicated silicon for secure enclaves, wifi, bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and cellular radios, and motion coprocessors.

Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.

what about all the components and sensors

Apple has bought startups with various technologies like Anobit, that developed advanced flash memory controllers, and have funded development efforts by partners. For example Apple worked hand in glove with Sharp to develop the tech for their 5K display panels. They also now have their own cellular chip designs in some models, in their quest for independence from Qualcomm. That’s all from memory, I’m sure there are many more examples.

so they didnt design all the components and sensors then

Were they ARM investors at the time they needed CPU for Newton? Was that before or after e.g. iPaq PDA-s? And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sleeve", that the iPaq slid into, not the other way around. Could run the ASR engine for about whole 10 mins before it drained the battery flat, haha. :-)

IIRC Apple originally invested in ARM during the development of the Newton. The original Newtons used ARM 610 CPUs. I don't know exactly when they sold their ARM stake but they kept their architecture license.

The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.

On selling of the ARM stake - asked ChatGPT:

Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).

Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.

Arm exists, it is unknown how much tech apple gets from Arm.

And tsmc (and therefore asml etc), usually apple reserves the newest upcoming node for their own production.

Arm licenses their designs to everybody. They are okay, but you are never going to make market leading processors by using the Arm designs.

The M1 and M2 were beating the best-in-class i7 when they were relased IIRC

Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.

It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive

Apple has an architectural license that lets them build their own ARM cores:

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...

It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.

Yep, Apple was a significant early investor in ARM. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...

The thing about Apple having a “special license” due to being a partial founder of Arm is an urban legend. They have an architectural license, just like several other companies making custom Arm CPUs do.

Yeah, why would ARM prevent other companies from paying more for the better license?

All they care about is that companies buy an ARM license, not that they use the boilerplate ARM CPU design.

Those designs are there to make it easier for companies to make ARM-based chips who would otherwise never be able to design their own.

Then why are they so shy about granting Qualcomm a license?

Qualcomm has a lot of money and Arm wants it. They’re not shy, but greedy.

> Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

More likely it was derived from PWRficient, or a clean sheet design that took lessons from it.

cpu yes, but what about the rest of the iphone?

They design much more in house than any other smartphone brand, except maybe Samsung.

CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…

They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.

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