Apple is a phenomenal company.
Its market capital nearly doubles its next closest rival, Google, and it
profits are the third greatest of any company in the world, according
to Forbes. Its so-called “war chest” – the money it has in liquid assets
– is now over $200 billion. Even the largest banks and petroleum
companies struggle to keep up.
That’s enabled the company’s famous reliance on proprietary
technology. While other companies outsource, Apple keeps it in-house
whenever possible. Recently, that’s expanded to include the chips found
in iOS devices. While Samsung, Microsoft, and HTC rely on Qualcomm and
Intel, Apple hired its own team of engineers to work on proprietary
designs exclusive to the iPhone and iPad.
At first, the fruits of this
labor were modest, but with each new release Apple’s AX chip line has
become more threatening. Cupertino’s engineers have already put other
ARM chip architects on notice, and they’re nipping at the heels of
Intel’s finest.
How it all started
In April of 2008, Apple
purchased a small fabless semiconductor company called P.A. Semi for a
rumored $278 million in cash. The company was founded five years earlier
by Daniel Dobberpuhl, a veteran engineer who first joined DEC all the
way back in 1976. He worked on the company’s highly successful MicroVAX
in the 80s. In 1998 he founded SiByte, which built MIPS system-on-a-chip
hardware. That company was bought by Broadcom several years later.
P.A. Semi’s focus was the design of a chip called PWRficient.
As its name suggests, it was built on the basis of IBM’s Power
architecture, which Apple used in its computers until 2005. The idea was
to build a new chip from the ground up with performance-per-watt as a
key design goal, while at the same time targeting high performance
applications. Its first chip, named the PA6T-1682M, ran at 2GHz but consumed only 13 watts in “typical” usage. A similar Intel chip from the era needed around 20 to 25 watts.
Despite the focus on efficiency, PWRficient was not
for mobile devices. The category didn’t really exist in volume, after
all, and the consumption of the first chip was too high for small
devices. The focus, instead, was – well, it’s hard to say. Like any
start-up, P.A. Semi was forced to take an “if you build it, they will
come” approach. While the hardware could be useful in anything from
supercomputers to laptops, the company had no immediate design plans.
In fact, the PA6T could’ve been
an excellent choice for Macs, and OS X laptops in particular. Its
combination of performance and efficiency in a power envelope well below
20 watts could’ve given Intel’s hardware a run for its money. As
reported by The Register in 2006, Apple and P.A. Semi “formed a
tight relationship,” to the point that the start-up was “counting on
the deal.” Instead, Apple chose Intel, and P.A. Semi was forced to court
manufacturers of high-end specialty hardware like Mercury Computer Systems.
Obviously, Apple didn’t forget
about P.A. Semi, as it rounded back to purchase the company as the
foundation for its in-house engineering initiative. Industry analysts
weren’t sure how much to read into Apple’s acquisition. A chip design
firm can be used in many ways. Apple already had plenty of ARM hardware
to choose from, and Intel was ramping up Atom, which was meant to
compete in phones as well as budget PCs. Many commenters concluded that
P.A. Semi would be used to accelerate specific tasks
through specialized chipsets and controllers, or that Apple planned to
use the company’s talent to help cement the implementation of hardware
acquired from its partners.
If at first you don’t succeed…
While the P.A. Semi deal gave
Apple over 150 talented employees to throw at the problem of designing
its own processor, the deal apparently was not without issues. After two
years of near silence about the start-up’s integration into the
Cupertino behemoth, news broke in March of 2010 that Dan Dobberpuhl had
left the company sometime in late 2009.
He wasn’t the only one unhappy
with how the acquisition turned out, as a number of key engineers
decided to jump ship in the years after Apple took over. Off-the-record sources told The New York Times
that some P.A. Semi employees were unhappy with the stock grants
provided after the purchase. Other analysts speculated that the
engineers simply weren’t happy in the new, more rigid corporate
structure. Whatever the case, Dobberpuhl and other engineers banded
together to form Agnilux, which was independent for less than a year
before being purchased by Google. Dobberpuhl himself did not stay on at
Google, but several team members who remained now work on Chrome OS.
Its mission incomplete, Apple
sought out another source of talent that might immediately improve the
company’s mobile hardware. The new target soon became Intrinsity, a
chip-design company based in Austin, Texas, that was founded in the 90s
under the name Exponential Technology. As with P.A. Semi, Apple and
Intrinisty had history. In the mid-90s, when it was known as
Exponential, the company partnered with Apple to build a new processor
to help Mac systems keep up with Intel. But Cupertino had become a
revolving door, and the Mac was losing money. The return of Steve Jobs
put the final nail in the deal’s coffin. He quickly brought the traditional IBM-produced PowerPC designs back into favor.
Defeated, Exponential re-branded
as EVSX, Inc, then as Intrinisty. It worked with chips using the MIPS
instruction set and largely flew under the radar of the technology
press, but in 2009 it made headlines by partnering with Samsung to
develop the 1GHz “Hummingbird” mobile processor. The chip was an
important milestone for everyone involved, as it departed significantly
from the off-the-shelf Cortex A8 designed and distributed by ARM.
Intrinisty’s role was the
implementation of a unique design process that made it possible for the
Cortex A8, normally clocked at 650MHz, to instead hit 1GHz, as it did in
the first Hummingbird chip. That was a huge leap forward at the time.
Most companies building mobile hardware simply relied on ARM’s design,
with perhaps a tweak here or there.
Hummingbird was entirely
compatible with A8 and the ARM instruction set, but its design was
re-worked from the ground up, which resulted in far superior
performance. Only Qualcomm’s Snapdragon was in the same league. Early
Samsung phones likely wouldn’t have achieved a strong foothold
throughout 2010 if Intrinisty hadn’t helped squeeze every last drop of
performance out of its devices.
Cupertino took note, and swooped in — and Apple didn’t trumpet its
purchase. The media took notice only when Intrinisty employees started
to change the employer they listed on LinkedIn. In that sense the move
was a surprise, but unlike the purchase of P.A. Semi, the reason for
acquiring Intrinisty was obvious: The A4 processor, which powered the
iPhone 4 and iPad, appeared at the same time as the acquisition. Like
Hummingbird, it was based off ARM’s Cortex A8 but was able to hit speeds
of up to 1GHz. The dots aren’t hard to connect.Modern performance rival to Intel
The newly acquired talent was quickly put to use. While the A4’s immediate successor used a design based off ARM’s Cortex A9, the A6, released in 2012’s iPhone 5, became the company’s first fully custom design. Internally called Swift, the A6 continued to use the ARM instruction set but otherwise abandoned the off-the-shelf design made available by the company.Related: Might Apple move the Mac to ARM processors?
A teardown by Chipworks found that unlike most competitors, which sketch the general layout of a processor with software, the A6 was manually
designed. Though labor intensive and costly, a manual approach
typically results in greater efficiency. Software is useful, but it’s
not creative. Only a team of engineers can find inefficiencies and
imagine unique solutions.
Reviews of the iPhone 5 made it
quickly and immediately clear that the efforts of Apple’s new engineers
had paid off. The phone achieved a greater performance leap over its predecessor
than any prior iPhone, more than doubling the speed of the iPhone 4S in
many benchmarks. The iPhone 5 was so quick, in fact, that it still
compared favorably to many mainstream Android handsets introduced in
2014, most of which used processors derived from the standard ARM Cortex
A15 design.
Apple’s performance lead has
only increased since then. Its newest chip, the A9 (which powers the
iPhone 6S and 6S Plus), annihilates the competition in most benchmarks,
and often more than doubles the score of its closest rivals. In web
benchmarks like Kraken and SunSpider, it nearly matches Intel-powered
mobile PCs such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. GeekBench tests have
also placed the iPhone 6S within stone’s throw of the Intel-powered
MacBook.
That’s not to say the iPhone 6S
is about to overcome Intel’s finest, or that Apple now has the edge. The
situation is more complex than that. Comparing a device that runs iOS
to one that runs Windows is difficult not only because of the difference
in operating system, but also because PCs run programs with more
demanding memory and processing requirements.
Still, a few minutes alone with
an iPhone 6S, or even the iPad Air 2, can tell you there’s something to
Apple’s rapidly rising scores. The company’s mobile devices are
blisteringly quick. They rarely hesitate, handle multiple apps with
ease, and play games at least as well as a PC with Intel’s integrated
graphics. And they do all of that within a power envelope that puts the
most miserly Core M to shame.
I reached out to Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, to gain perspective on Apple’s success. His reply was crisp.
“It’s really unprecedented in
the industry that a team like this should crank out such high-quality
silicon. Typically, those who crank out silicon for their own products
aren’t industry-leading,” he said. Indeed, there’s no recent example of
any company achieving the same.
Chip design is not Apple’s core business, yet it’s managed to defeat
companies like Qualcomm that exist for no other reason. The strategy of
designing hardware in-house for first-party products, known as “vertical
integration,” used to be considered a sure-fire way to fail.
Cupertino’s engineers are changing the notion of what’s possible.Production problems
Chip design hasn’t been without
its troubles, however. The scope of an Apple product launch makes
manufacturing enough silicon difficult. While it has made major progress
in performance, the company is still different from Intel or Samsung in
one important way. It doesn’t own its fabrication facilities. These
days, most processor design companies don’t.
AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are
just a few of the major names that rely on a third party to build what
they engineer. None of them sell on the scale of Apple, however, and
that’s led to production constraints. The iPhone 6S exemplifies this, as
it contains one of two similar chips built by different foundries. One
is TSMC, which uses a 16-nanometer production process. The other is
Samsung, which builds the A9 with its 14nm process.
This, like so much of Apple’s
endeavor in chip design, is extremely unusual. Using two different
foundries obviously complicates making a device perform predictably. The
difference is too small to notice outside of a controlled benchmark,
but it’s obviously not ideal. Some have called the issue “chipgate” –
though, so far, it doesn’t seem to be gaining traction like the iPhone
6’s bending issue or the iPhone 4’s antenna.
Design costs are also an issue,
as an architecture can’t be ported from one production process to the
next just by tweaking a few parameters. It’s a difficult problem that
requires a unique approach for each foundry. While the overall design is
the same for both Samsung’s and TSMC’s chips, the products are not the
same size and have differences visible in a die shot. That means Apple
had to double up on some of its design work.
There’s no easy solution to this
problem. Even buying or building a chip fabrication company in-house
might not work. Apple had to contract with two of the world’s
largest to obtain enough volume, so it would take years to build up
similar capacity internally even if the company purchased one of the
world’s leading producers tomorrow. Production will hold back design for
years to come.
The only way is up
The next chip scheduled for
delivery from Apple is the A9X, which will appear in the iPad Pro this
November. While still shrouded in detail (no one knows its clock speed,
or how many cores it will have), it’s alleged to out-perform
80 percent of portable PCs shipped in the last 12 months. Which, let’s
face it, is another way of saying it out-performs a respectable chunk
of Intel powered hardware sold today.
I know, that sounds ridiculous.
But the idea that Apple might build its own class-leading mobile silicon
seemed equally ridiculous just a few years ago. The chip design wing in
Cupertino may be young, but it has serious talent — and access to the
company’s Scrooge McDuck vault.
Patrick Moorhead is certainly
optimistic about Apple’s prospects, saying “I think with their momentum,
Apple will continue this for a long, long time in mobility,” and adding
“what they’re trying to do right now is move up the processor food
chain to a desktop-sized processor.” If the A9X delivers what it
promises, it could seriously upset the balance of power in silicon, and
between Apple and Intel in particular.
While the A9 and A9X are huge
wins for Cupertino, they’re important to far more than the company’s
bottom line. Producing best-in-class chips from nothing in a span of
five years is a feat everyone thought impossible – so no one tried. As
iPhones and iPads extend their performance lead, others with deep
pockets will begin to wonder if they, too, can design their own silicon
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