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My understanding is the reference designs are based on ARM (UK) ones, then Apple's chip design team in Israel tweak them to suit Apple's specific device needs. And they're presumably manufactured in China like everything else?

But yes, largely unrelated to Apple Pay, lol! Except perhaps that with decent high tech industry, one might have suspected Israel to have high tech AP before now, too. ;-)
Sounds like the Israeli banks held-out to drive a hard bargain, in order to secure a relatively low 0.05% rate.

It is much more than a tweak, it's an entirely different implementation, otherwise, we should've seen stronger competition from the competitors (ARM only sells the CPU specification)

Many companies today (including Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) are designing their own chips to be ARM compliant, but the chips themselves are quite different in the implementations.

In a kind-of comparison, it's like AMD creates an Intel-compatible CPU (x86-64).

The team in Israel (as much as we know) are doing not only the CPU design but the entire System-On-Chip (the "Axx") which basically integrated multiple chips and abilities in addition to the CPU, that includes the GPU (Apple original design), neural network chip, image processor chip, and more...

I know several people who work there, Apple have quite a talented team :)
 
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My understanding is the reference designs are based on ARM (UK) ones, then Apple's chip design team in Israel tweak them to suit Apple's specific device needs. And they're presumably manufactured in China like everything else?
I don't think that is right. Apple licenses the ARM instruction set from ARM but everything else about Apple's A chips are entirely its own design. They are not tweaks of any existing design by ARM or any other manufacturer.
 
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