Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

To what extent can these improvements be ascribed to Apple, as opposed to the particular silicon fab process node?

I'm also curious about this. And, even moreso - did apple just start designing chips from scratch or did they buy someone who already had some cutting edge technology? Its hard to believe that they're beating everyone just out of nowhere...

Right after the launch of the original iPhone, Apple bought P.A. Semi for $27 billion to work on chips for future iPhones.

A lot of those guys had a BBQ at my apartment complex for a celebration hosted by my roommate, who worked at Apple’s Silicon Team with them. Lots of cool things to talk to them about. This was around the time of the iPhone 7.

A huge number of them were Iranian.

actually, $278 million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

Oh right you are. I shouldn't trust my memory for trivia that old.

It’s not out of nowhere. It’s just that people didn’t pay attention to their mobile chips.

But Anandtech had articles as far back as the A12 7 years ago where it was competing with the intel chips of the era

A secondhand link because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/05/apples-a12-bionic...

> because anandtech is restructured now unfortunately

…because he left to work on the chips.

The changes to the site are very recent, and they continued doing stellar reports after he left too.

and silenced by Apple, I guess.

This is the payoff of nearly over a decade of R&D being poured into their chip development.

Apple is a vertical integration company and the CPU/GPU in their devices was a clear sore spot of relying on external vendors they did not like.

You can see their lead continuing and growing with things like their new modem used in some iPhones

Reply on news.ycombinator.com