The king of mobile phone processors! Apple's A-series "chip empire" has begun to take shape
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As we all know, Apple is the technology company with the highest liquid assets, which is difficult to match even for oil companies. It is precisely because of its strong cash reserves that Apple has a large number of patented technologies available. While other companies are still outsourcing the production of product components, Apple has customized as much as possible or even developed them in-house. The most eye-catching of these is the A-series chips currently used in iOS devices. However, today Apple's achievements are no longer limited to A-series chips. It is more like a powerful chip manufacturer that the industry is in awe of. The booming A-series chips About five or six years ago, when Samsung, Microsoft and HTC were all relying on Qualcomm to provide chips, Apple had already recruited talents everywhere and formed its own engineering team to design chips for iPhone and iPad. During this period, Apple acquired two iconic companies. The first was the acquisition of a small fabless semiconductor company PASemi for $278 million in 2008, laying the foundation for its independent chip research project. The outside world questioned why Apple acquired PASemi, after all, there were already various ARM hardware for Apple to choose from. It was not until Apple acquired Intrinisty again that people discovered Apple's true intentions. It was not just to get more chip development talents and strengthen hardware and software. More importantly, the A4 processor was born. Apple did use the foundation of the previous acquisition to develop a dedicated chipset and controller. Since the release of the A4 chip in 2010, Apple has continuously expanded its A series chip lineup, introducing different designs and functional goals. Of course, Apple's development and research in this area has not always been smooth sailing, but with the update and release of each generation of A chips, the threat of this chip series has become increasingly greater, especially the A6 chip that appeared in the iPhone 5, which became Apple's first fully customized chip. Apple internally calls it Swift. Although the A6 still uses the ARM instruction set, it no longer uses the ready-made public version design. The A6 is completely hand-designed, consuming a lot of manpower and costing more, but hand-made design usually brings higher energy efficiency. It turns out that the A6 runs twice as fast as the previous generation of chips. With advanced user interfaces, operating systems, and software development frameworks and tools, Apple has established its advantage in application processors. With its capital advantage, Apple is still independently developing very expensive mobile application processors. The performance advantage of the A series chips continues to expand. The previous generation A9 chip crushes its opponents in running points, and opponents often take half a year to catch up. It has to be said that in just a few years, Apple has set off a revolutionary storm in the mobile chip industry. In 2013, it released the industry's first 64-bit smartphone chip A7 and introduced the X variant with powerful graphics processing performance. Apple did not stop there and continued to promote the development of chips through its world-class semiconductor team. Today, the A series chips have become the most powerful chips in the history of mobile chips. The A10 chip inside the iPhone7 is the most significant progress since Apple's system-on-chip moved to a 64-bit processor architecture. The A10Fusion chip not only has 3.3 billion transistors, but also is the first A series to adopt a quad-core design. Under the new dynamic voltage frequency adjustment mode and performance controller, it can intelligently manage the core load in a targeted manner, so that some cores can be completely shut down, and the energy consumption control ability is amazingly efficient. In this regard, some people even praise that the A10 chip inside the iPhone7 is almost comparable to the performance of Intel's entry-level ultra-low power chips, and its manufacturing cost is lower and the power management is better. Previous reviews have also shown that the old Intel chips in the MacBook Air have already shown their shortcomings compared to the 10 in terms of running scores, but the point is not how fast it is, the running score is not important, but when the same performance is played, the A series chips have a higher energy efficiency level . At the same time, because of the launch of different processing series products on the market, the comparison of A series chips has become more and more distinct. Not only A series chips In addition to the A series chips designed for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, Apple has begun to develop chips for more and more product lines. Last year, we saw Apple's first SiP (System-in-Package) system-level packaged small chip on the first generation Apple Watch: Apple S1, which is an ultra-micro chip tailored for wearable devices. As an upgrade product of Apple S1, this year's second-generation smartwatch Apple Watch Series 2 launched the Apple S2 chip with a dual-core design, which has taken the performance of microchips to a new level and increased the speed of Apple Watch by as much as 50%. In addition, S2 also added a new graphics processor to increase the graphics processing performance by 2 times. Not only that, Apple has not forgotten to continue to improve the Apple S1 chip. The chip updated on the Apple Watch Series 1 smartwatch also uses a dual-core design to accelerate performance, so that users can easily feel the pleasure of quickly launching various applications they often use. To be honest, the Apple S1 and S2 chips should only be equivalent to a brand new beginning, because on the AirPods wireless headphones newly released by Apple this year, we have seen the new ultra-low power Apple W1 chip. Although Apple did not reveal too many details related to the W1 chip, Apple made it clear that any new experience of AirPods wireless headphones must benefit from the revolutionary ultra-low power Apple W1 chip. At present, at least three AirPods innovations are related to the W1 chip. The first is the seamless connection of "simplifying the complex and getting it right in one step". With the W1 chip, pairing is completed immediately as long as it is close to the iPhone or Apple Watch, providing the best fully automatic setting solution in the industry. In addition, the W1 chip can be connected "stably". Apple claims that not only will there be no intermittent problems of ordinary Bluetooth headphones, but it can also "provide excellent sound quality." The last point is ultra-low power consumption. The W1 chip consumes only one-third of the power of traditional wireless chips when working. In general, the W1 chip not only helps to transmit high-quality audio, but also brings the best fully automatic setting solution in the industry, as well as the most outstanding battery life. The only question is, considering that this is a wireless headset chip, will Apple consider providing authorization for the AppleW1 chip? After all, this is conducive to other third-party manufacturers to create wireless headset accessories of equal or better quality. What is Apple's next ambition? For the industry, Apple's A series brand role is unprecedented, or it can be said that no company has achieved such an achievement recently, and such a team can actually develop such a high-quality chip. Usually, participants who can develop such chips for their products can always represent "industry leadership", at least not at all inferior to Qualcomm. The key is that this has laid a solid foundation for Apple's "vertical integration" strategy of independently designing hardware for its products. As the advantages of the A series chips in the iPhone and iPad continue to expand, seeing the lucrative market handed over to Apple, some manufacturers with money in their pockets may also be ready to move and start thinking about whether they can also design chips themselves. However, it is not so easy to complete the design of independent non-public version in a short period of time, which Google has proved. In any case, we have seen three innovative chip designs from Apple so far, namely the A series, S series and W series. Although the S series and W series are still relatively new, referring to the development pace of the past few generations of A series chips, Apple has no intention of stopping there, but instead wants to make it a first-class chip in the industry. We don’t know what Apple’s next step is. According to reports and revelations in recent years, there are probably three signs in front of us: - First, a SoC integrated chip with an integrated modem? - Then, a self-designed GPU graphics processor unit, including a modem? - Finally, it is possible to bring the A series chip to the desktop? Observing the development process of SoC system-level chips in the mobile phone industry, integrated modems seem to be one of the necessary steps. Qualcomm has already done this and has a very outstanding advantage. Recently, Intel, which has been silent for a long time, has begun to provide modems for some models of Apple iPhones, but there have been signs a few years ago that Apple is also interested in building its own modems. I believe it is only a matter of time before it is integrated into the A series chips. In addition, since December last year, there have been constant rumors that Apple will not only focus on the CPU central processing unit of mobile chips in the future, but also consider developing its own GPU graphics processing unit. The relevant work is "quietly going on behind the scenes" instead of obtaining a license from Imagination Technologies for a long time . It is said that Apple does not want to see performance improved by stacking GPU core clusters. The more cores, the worse the stability, and the power consumption is not easy to control. Instead, it tends to have a smaller or relatively reasonable GPU configuration. If Apple really has an outstanding GPU team and is willing to invest generously, then Apple will be able to achieve significant performance improvements by customizing its own GPU architecture. Both the chip area and performance can be more suitable for the overall chip structure design than the GPU cores provided before. Apple is still a novice in this regard, but it already has mature and very successful experience in customizing CPU cores, which can help Apple avoid detours. At the same time, Apple seems to want to do more than just be the dominant force in mobile chips. According to rumors, Apple is very likely to bring the A series chips to the Mac product line, mainly because in the field of ultra-low power chips, the performance per watt of the A series is gradually narrowing the gap with Intel . Of course, Intel's leading position in the field of high-performance processors is unquestionable, but it is hard to say what the future of low-end entry-level ultra-thin products will be like. In fact, the biggest challenge for Apple is the seamless compatibility of software between different chip architectures, which may not be solved even after years or decades. In short, judging from the development momentum of these three series of chips, Apple still has a long way to go in the entire chip industry, but as far as the mobile industry is concerned, Apple's food chain is already large enough, and more achievements may be presented one by one in the next two or three years .As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity. |
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