mpantone

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

A reaction to NVIDIA buying ARM?

It's possible, but adding a couple of RISC-V engineers isn't going to eliminate Arm license fees regardless of who owns Arm. Right now Softbank is pocketing those fees.

Note that Apple did not publicly object to Nvidia's acquisition. If they really didn't want the Nvidia-Arm acquisition to occur, they probably would have vocally pushed the FTC and international NGOs to block the merger.

A couple of job requisitions in a small group isn't going to halt all Arm silicon development at Apple.

A more likely scenario right now is that Apple is trying to keep options open looking toward the future. Remember that RISC-V does not currently have performance that comes close to what Apple has implemented with their recent A-series and M-series SoCs.

Cesar Battistini Maziero said:

I'm sure ARM sells the architecture and innovation to competitors.

Arm has no rights to Apple's intellectual property. Apple is an Arm licensee.

I think today Apple doesn't even use Arm's reference designs for its CPU cores. Apple's CPU designs have been proprietary for many years. They're really only using the Arm ISA.

Now that Apple cut the bonds with intel, we know that Intel would sell apples custom chips (like the original MacBook Air) 1 year after release, to competitors.

Nah, without a doubt, there is still an active contract in place between Apple and Intel since Apple is still selling Intel-powered devices. Apple likely will continue to do so for several more years, most likely keeping an Intel-powered Mac Pro available for the professional customers that rely on Intel hardware for their established workflow.

Apple had a very heavy hand on that and many other intel chip designs.

Previous Apple-Intel contracts seem to indicate exclusivity for certain chips. The logical conclusion is that exclusivity is in perpetuity for the component's life cycle. We have not seen any old Apple-only Intel CPUs being widely marketed. There's little demand for an ancient CPU.

wood1208 said:

Why is this important or surprise ? We all know 2nd to 3rd week of September, Apple announces new iPhone models.

This is important because the timing of the iPhone release affects Apple's quarterly revenue. The fact that this was an ANALyst writing a research memo to its investor clients seems to have escaped you.

Why is this a surprise? Well the article clearly covers that. Last year the iPhone 12 family was announced in October -- later than usual -- a COVID driven delay.

This is also important because a September launch would indicate that Apple has a handle on its supply chain despite widespread component and materials shortages that have been plaguing the semiconductor industry for about a year. A solid execution of the iPhone 13 family would demonstrate to Apple investors that Apple has adapted to the changing business environment, perhaps better than its competitors.

Are you an American with a retirement account or pension? If so, then you are almost certainly an indirect AAPL shareholder. Apple Inc.'s ability to execute their business strategy is important to your retirement.

This is also important to AppleInsider who worship at the Altar of the Almighty Pageview. They publish stuff like this because it's what keeps the lights on.

sflocal said:

"Millions" for 35-70 people?  Go figure.

The people throwing money at the homeless problem must be the same running the San Francisco money-pit as well.

One thing for certain: you don't know squat about SF Bay Area real estate.

Small properties (like 1 bedroom condos) in much of Santa Clara County run around $700-800 per square foot. Even a small rental unit -- like a 400 sq. ft. studio (which don't really exist) -- for two years would probably run around $1200 per month.

Much of the "reasonably" priced real estate in the area dates from the housing boom of the late Sixties and early Seventies, mostly apartments and condo conversions, maybe ranging from a low $500/sq. ft. in the less expensive neighborhoods to $1000/sq. ft. in upscale neighborhoods like Palo Alto (their public school system drives up the price).

The article specifically states that Apple is also including some funding for healthcare (super expensive) and financial help.

It's not like they are going to relocate these people to Flint, Michigan and dumping them in tenements.

So yeah, "millions" for 35-70 people isn't so far fetched. But you don't know anything about cost of living in the SF Bay Area, specifically Santa Clara County, that is for sure.

mcdave said:

The longer they’re leaving it, the more the competition has stepped up. The buying public can’t see beyond marketing specs so genuine advantages are already mitigated. Single-core performance has been matched by Intel 11th gen i7/i9 so it’ll be interesting to see how much Apple has left in the tank.

This is not how Apple is approaching their ASi architecture.

During the WWDC 2020 keynote, Johny Srouji explained that Apple Silicon's focus was performance-per-watt. Not benchmarks. He pounded this concept again and again during his segment.

Because of Intel's ineptitude in advancing their process technology, they had to throw efficiency out the window to keep up with AMD. So Rocket Lake (10 nm Ice Lake architecture backported to the 14 nm node) generates massive amounts of heat and tops out at 8 cores. Hell, Intel even had to come up with a new platform which will probably be abandoned after one generation.

Intel can beat Apple on single-core performance but at a massive power load. However that's not the sole usage case. Apple's big.LITTLE implementation on M-series SoCs is superior to the competition and for the PC market, there is no competition yet from Intel nor AMD. 

Apple has improved price-per-watt to the point that ASi can beat Intel handily. That's why they shipped ASi last fall. They have been working on this for years and have been advancing faster than Intel.

This is same thing that happened with their M-series SoCs. Apple's performance-per-watt on mobile silicon has advanced faster than their competitors.

As mentioned by KTR, the hardware-software integration is better. This includes that managing big.LITTLE both on PC silicon and mobile silicon, the latter has provided Apple many years of experience. My guess is that Apple has been running macOS on A-series SoCs as well as prototype M-series SoCs on Macs for YEARS in their labs.

And Apple is really just getting started with machine learning on Macs. I expect Apple to pull ahead over the next couple of years when considering multiple tasks and usage cases as more tasks get handled by the Neural Engine instead of having the CPU cores do it. You wouldn't see this superiority in a standard artificial benchmark. Those benchmarks don't include machine learning because AMD and Intel currently don't have any machine learning silicon in their CPUs.

Apple does not design their CPUs and GPUs so they can be King of Cinebench or King of Furmark.