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by formerly_proven1 days ago |
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upvoteby swiftcoder23 hours ago|
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Yeah, "first chip" here likely means they contracted Broadcom (or a firm with similar experience) to do all the heavy lifting. Building out your own in-house teams for this sort of thing is a decade-long project - just look how much inside Apple's early chips was licensed ARM / PowerVR cores
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upvoteby MisterTea22 hours ago|
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Apple didn't have the talent in-house until they bought Intrincity who worked with Samsung on Apple's earlier Arm chips as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
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upvoteby donavanm16 hours ago|
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That’s not quite fair. As I recall there were about 1,500 people in that part of the hardware org circa mid 2000s. Before PA Semi there were pretty established teams already doing VLSI/PD/verification/validation, PCB, and of course analog/mixed hardware, in their own work and in conjunction with samsung, old broadcom, qualcomm, etc. Lots of inhouse work went in to all those bespoke monitors, phones, apple tv, airports, etc etc.

My recollection is that PA Semi was very much for the architectural and design talent, even though it was an “asset purchase” and all the existing Power & military chips were hived off.

For Intrinsity I recall a lot of interest was actually in their existing graphics work and EDA. ISTR that those early mobile GPUs were what they focused on.

I was in the mansfield org circa ‘07-11. I spent a lot of time flying between cupertino and austin/bee caves that first year.

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upvoteby selectodude22 hours ago|
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I think the folks at PA Semi had some chops too.
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upvoteby reinitctxoffset20 hours ago|
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The way I heard it PA Semi was the singular driving force that led to Apple Silicon, but I'm not any kind of insider that's just the chatter I heard.

Whoever it was, whooo, that's hot shit. I remember an M1 MacBook Air just cleaning the clock of an Intel MacBook Pro and thinking "x86_64 has real competition again".

Great silicon. I'm over it with not having root on my own machine, so I've left the ecosystem, but it's really nice hardware, can't dispute that.

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upvoteby markhahn3 hours ago|
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it would be interesting to know apple's true/inside attitude towards people putting linux on their hardware. they don't seem very interested in helping, but donno whether they actively sabotage either.
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upvoteby re-thc18 hours ago|
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> The way I heard it PA Semi was the singular driving force that led to Apple Silicon

And a lot of them are sitting under Qualcomm via the Nuvia acquisition.

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upvoteby stinkbeetle21 hours ago|
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PA Semi group did the logic designs. I think they're talking about physical design though.
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