Why is Apple's self-designed A-series chips so successful?
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Anyone who has been following Apple's product updates knows that unlike other chip manufacturers, Apple is able to add new features to its new products every year. Apple's self-designed A-series chips have significant performance improvements and many new features every year. The performance improvement of the chip will make users more looking forward to Apple products. Below we will analyze an important reason why Apple's chip performance can continue to improve. For the past half century, Moore's Law has guided the development of the technology industry. Moore's Law was proposed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. This law predicts that the number of transistors per unit area of integrated circuits will double every two years, and computing performance will also double accordingly. In recent years, transistors have become smaller and smaller, and the capital intensity per wafer has continued to increase, and the cost of finished wafers has also increased. The result is that the area reduction is greater than the reduction in wafer cost, so that chip manufacturers can produce more powerful and feature-rich chips at the same manufacturing cost. To highlight their new process technology, Intel pointed out that they have a 22nm process notebook processor that packs 960 million transistors in an area of only 130 square millimeters. The chip's successor uses a 14-nanometer process, with 1.3 billion transistors and an area of only 82 square millimeters. From this perspective, Intel's chips are getting stronger and smaller. Apple's chips are different from Intel's: Apple did not use smaller transistors to increase functions and reduce chip area; instead, Apple adopted new production technology and kept the chip area about the same as the previous generation. As shown in the figure: In order to significantly improve performance, Apple can accept a slight increase in chip costs. Apple's approach is also good. The production costs of iPhone and iPad components provided by professional evaluation agencies show that the proportion of chips is not very high, and the performance improvement has many benefits for users. Apple's A10 chip is expected to use the same 16-nanometer process as the A9, and recently Apple's chip supplier TSMC revealed that Apple has "added many functions" to their next-generation chip, which means that the area of the A10 chip is likely to be larger than that of the A9. The chip area of the A10 should be around 120 square millimeters , which is similar to the chip area of the A5. The A11 chip is likely to use TSMC's 10nm process, and by the time the A12 is released, TSMC's 7nm process technology may have matured. Compared with previous generations of technology, these technologies have made many improvements and progress. If Apple keeps the area of the A11/A12 chip at around 100 square millimeters , these chips will not only add many new features, but also have greatly improved performance. 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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