Top chip architect joins Apple, which may speed up the development of Mac processors

Source: The content is translated from "fortune" by Semiconductor Industry Observer, thank you.

According to foreign media reports, Apple recently poached a top chip engineer from ARM. On the one hand, this can fill the gap left by the departure of Gerard Williams III; on the other hand, Apple also wants to speed up its own chip development, hoping to achieve the goal of expanding its self-developed ARM chips to more powerful devices (such as Mac) as soon as possible.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Apple hired Mike Filippo as the company's chip architect in May this year. Before joining Apple, Mike Filippo was the chief engineer of ARM. It is understood that the three generations of Cortex A57/A72/A76 CPU cores were all designed by Mike Filippo, and he was also the chief architect of Ares and Zeus CPUs. Before joining ARM, Mike Filippo also worked at AMD and Intel.

Apple launched a plan several years ago with the expectation that it would replace the Intel chips used in its Mac computers with ARM-based processors by 2020. Filippo's experience with more advanced chips such as servers will help achieve this goal. Apple also plans to expand its internal chip manufacturing efforts to new device categories, such as headsets that interact with augmented and virtual reality, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this year, Intel officials and developers privately stated that Apple is expected to switch to ARM chips for Mac starting in 2020.

At that time, news pointed out that Apple would release a universal program (Marzipan Project) before 2021, which can run on Mac, iPhone and iPad at the same time, similar to Microsoft's previous UWP. This is not groundless. Last year, Apple ported Voice Memos, Stocks and Home on the iOS platform to macOS. This year, Apple plans to allow developers to port iPad APP to macOS, and then connect to iPhone in 2020, and finally realize that by 2021, you only need to download the same APP on all platforms.

Obviously, this is closely aligned with Mac's use of ARM architecture processors.

At the same time, this shift will greatly increase the number of Mac apps and will reduce the amount of work developers need to do to create Mac apps.

In March this year, the well-known foreign whistleblower Slashleaks said that he found the chip running score of model APWL2@HmP in Geekbench. The information showed that this is a chip with a 12-core processor. There are not so many cores on the current commercial chips. Even Apple’s highest current product is only the 8-core A12X Bionic. The maximum main frequency of this 12-core chip reaches 3.19GHz, which is also a frequency that current chips cannot reach. In addition, a 10-core chip was found in the Geekbench score database, and the main frequency reached 3.4GHz. These two versions of chips may be used by Apple to distinguish between high-end and low-end new Macs.

This 12-core chip scored 6912 points in single-core and 24240 points in multi-core on Geekbench, while the 10-core chip, due to its higher main frequency, achieved 7335 points in single-core, but 20580 points in multi-core. If you have no idea about these scores, referring to the current Intel Core i9-9900K, most of them have 6400 points in single-core and 36397 points in multi-core (Hackintosh running macOS), these two ARM chips have higher single-core scores but lose in multi-core scores, probably because these 12/10 cores are big.LITTLE, while the 8 cores of the i9-9900K are all big cores. Of course, due to the different architectures of ARM and X86, this comparison is not accurate.

Since the chip is used in Mac (tablet or laptop), it will have lower restrictions on heat dissipation and power consumption than the two mobile devices iPhone and iPad, so there is more room for Apple to stack cores and frequencies. In addition, the combination of self-developed chips and its own system hardware and software, so the ARM-equipped Mac may still have quite good performance. However, the above are currently rumors and may not be true, so we still have to continue to watch for follow-up news.

But what we can be sure of is that this will be a big blow to Intel, as Apple is said to contribute about 5% of Intel's annual revenue.

At present, in addition to the successful A series chips (A12X is said to be more powerful than 92% of thin and light notebooks), Apple also has the T2 chip. Historically, the Mac product line has experienced two main processor migrations, the first from the 68000 series to IBM's PowerPC, and the second from PowerPC to Intel.