How did Apple beat Intel on their first try designing a CPU? One has done it for decades, the other not.
In: Technology
They licensed the ARM core, which has been undergoing improvements for years and years. ARM makes a family of customizable microprocessor cores, which is exactly what Apple needed.
Apple also has significant experience in doing chip designs, just not necessarily the main microprocessor. Hardware design was one of the company’s key competencies from the very beginning. And they’ve done quite a few custom chips on their own.
Then they hired a bunch of really really good, experienced microprocessor designers to head up their design teams.
This wasn’t their first try, only their first chip for Macs. They’ve been making chips for years for iPhones, iPods, and iPads.
Well first, ARM started out in 1985, they licensed their stuff to Apple in 2007-ish. ARM is a company that sells CPU designs, not CPUs, so companies can tweak them and they send it off to a chip factory to have it built. The bulk of the work is actually done by ARM. Apple’s processor is one of these, though modified somewhat more than most. But it’s important to understand that the design is still based on work that has been out there for decades, just like Intel.
Second, a huge part of the reason why they are doing so good on their first try is because they don’t have to be compatible. Specifically an Intel processor needs to still function and boot if you want to load up DOS. DOS requires some things that are really bad performance wise. In fact there is so much bad performance stuff that’s required that modern processors convert the code into new microde and then run that, because running the code the way it’s supposed to be done is too slow. ARM generally has no such requirement, today it’s largely used on phones, so just the OS for that specific phone needs to run on it. The CPU has been designed with performance in mind and a lot of old useless stuff is simply not there, so an iphone probably won’t boot an old OS but it doesn’t matter because it’s an iphone. Basically, ARM is just a better design that’s only possible because it doesn’t have to be compatible with computers from the early 90s.
And finally, for years ARM has been the choice for mobile and battery powered use, with a heavy emphasis on low power. What Apple has done is made just a big version, and it turns out that when you take a more modern processor that uses less power, then you can make it nice and fast and heat and power won’t matter as much (so you can make it even bigger without heat and power being an issue).
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