Essentially, we’re in a world where “as long as we can have a little tie-in with Apple, it’s a guarantee of box office receipts and article views.” In April 2008, Apple spent $278 million to acquire PA Semi, a chip design company founded in 2003. Then, in March 2010, it spent $121 million to buy Intrinsity, which specializes in optimizing the design of circuits. On November 17, 2020, the M1 processor was released, giving Macs the battery life and “readiness” of Wintel laptops.
Apple, long “godified” by many Apple fans, seems to always be “omnipresent and omnipotent.” Cell phones and personal computers are not enough. The “M1 is coming forcefully, Apple will also enter the server market in the future” is also a bit overly enthusiastic. Irresponsible predictions do not seem unreasonable.
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▲ Before the acquisition by Apple, PA Semi planned to develop a server platform, but how much motivation Apple has to develop its own server chips is a big question mark.
But looking back, Apple has a very powerful R&D team that can “work hard to create a unique processor core”, but its cloud services are relatively “two-pronged”, and it develops its own data center server chips. -Effective business In addition to being a question mark in itself, for Apple the 5G modem is still worthy of concern. Apple tried to develop 5G modem chips, but later found that the massive mobilization of thousands of engineers could not produce modem chips that met expectations. For the iPhone 17, he still had to rely on Qualcomm (Qualcomm), and there were also rumors that Apple had decided Rumors to abandon development.
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Over the years, Apple has been the “pioneer” of TSMC’s most advanced manufacturing processes, investing enormous amounts of manpower and material resources and, when it broke through the 3 nanometer barrier, it in turn influenced the research and development of 5G modems. for the overwhelming “3-nanometer Apple chip performance” seems to be unsatisfactory, and the modular circuit layout commonality of the M3 family is obviously not as good as that of M1 and M2.” There is no need to waste space in processing .
The difficulties faced by Apple and the price paid to promote Apple Silicon may far outweigh outside speculation. Whether Apple can still develop server processors is a big question mark, no matter how you look at it.
▲ Judging from the chip layout, the “modular commonality” of Apple’s M3 family does not seem to be as obvious as that of M1 and M2. Perhaps the “naturally dangerous” threshold of 3 nanometers leaves no room for Apple’s chip R&D team for “elegant block stacking.”
Of course, the trendy “AI chip” is also a potential possibility, but the prerequisite is that “Apple must first have a clear set of AI strategies.” But unfortunately no sign of this has yet been seen. to see if Apple will “tell the world” a clearer direction at the 2024 evangelistic conference.
(First image source: Apple)
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2024-01-08 05:30:14
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