System On A Chip -- SOC -- Apple Silicon -- Quick! What Are Triple-A Titles? June 8, 2024

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Apple Silicon -- CNBC -- December 1, 2023. Link here.

Apple’s soaring stock price over the past two decades has been driven by its iconic consumer devices. It started with the iPod and iMac. Then came the iPhone and iPad. And more recently, the Apple Watch and AirPods.

But there’s a lot more to the biggest U.S. company by market cap than just gadgets. At its Silicon Valley headquarters, in a non-descript room filled with a couple hundred buzzing machines and a handful of engineers in lab coats, Apple is designing the custom chips that power its most popular products.

Apple first debuted homegrown semiconductors in the iPhone 4 in 2010. As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple’s own silicon, ending the company’s 15-plus years of reliance on Intel.

“One of the most, if not the most, profound change at Apple, certainly in our products over the last 20 years, is how we now do so many of those technologies in-house,” said John Ternus, who runs hardware engineering at Apple. “And top of the list, of course, is our silicon.”

That change has also opened Apple up to a new set of risks. Its most advanced silicon is primarily manufactured by one vendor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Meanwhile, smartphones are recovering from a deep sales slump, and competitors like Microsoft are making big leaps in artificial intelligence.

In November, CNBC visited Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, the first journalists allowed to film inside one of the company’s chip labs. We got a rare chance to talk with the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji, about the company’s push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

“We have thousands of engineers,” Srouji said. “But if you look at the portfolio of chips we do: very lean, actually. Very efficient.”

Unlike traditional chipmakers, Apple is not making silicon for other companies.

“Because we’re not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product,” Srouji said. “That gives us freedom to optimize, and the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products.”

It's a very, very long article.

Buried deep in the article:

Apple’s leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance.

“It’s early days,” said Ternus, who’s been at Apple for 22 years. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think there’s so many Macs now, pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago.”

Ternus said that when he started, “the way we tended to make products is we were using technologies from other companies, and we were effectively building the product around that.” Despite a focus on beautiful design, “they were constrained by what was available,” he said.

Triple-A titles?

One can quickly see where Apple is headed and what it means for Apple. 

Apple is playing the long game.

TSM and AAPL.