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Comment by mrheosuper | Hacker News Reader

By PMIC, did you mean VRM ?, if not, can you tell me the difference between them ?

I'm not an expert on the topic and don't really know the difference. But in the video they say it can finetune power delivery to individual parts of the SoC and reduce idle power.

Well, Every single CPU need some kind of voltage regulation module to work.

About "fine tune" part, this does not relate to PMIC(or VRM) at all, more like CPU design: How many power domain does this CPU have ?

I don’t know how it is for Apple-M, but for chips I’ve worked on, this can definitely relate to PMIC/VRMs. You can tune the voltage you feed to the various power domains based on the clock speed required for those domains at any given time. We do it with on-chip power regulators, but I suppose for Apple M it would perhaps be off-chip PMICs feeding power into the chip.

it's the other way around. You design PMIC for a given CPU, not designing CPU for a given PMIC(but in Apple case, the engineers can work closely together to come up with something balance).

I always wondered how to gauge how effective Apple's Dialog carveout was, in terms of was it just instant PMIC department or even effective at building a foundation for them? Given their long relationship, I would think it might be pretty seamless.

I assume Apple probably do that more than I know, it is just interesting that their vertical acquisition history feels the most boring and the most interesting.

At least looking from the outside, it feels like relatively small pieces develop into pretty big differentiators, like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity and Passif paving the way to their SoCs.

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