It sounds like you think that disruptive innovation is something that should be an annual routine. It should not. M2 should be an incremental innovation.
I fear the same. That “M3 will not be an industry ‘disruptive’ chip.” I fear its primary gains will be those that automatically come with the 3nm process: smaller, denser die, more transistors, less heat and lower power consumption and potentially higher clock speed.
But as for CPU and GPU? I fear Apple will be relegated to a “brute force” approach: more of the same, just more.
I fear that
we’ll get more of the same “Avalanche” and “Blizzard” cores from the iPhone A15 SoC — but in higher numbers. I.e. fourteen of the
same M2 Performance cores; four of the
same M2 Efficiency cores. Or maybe 16/6 or 18/8 and so on. Maybe they’ll tinker with the system level cache a bit. Maybe they’ll do more with the secretive AMX “cores.” Maybe we’ll get LPDDR5X RAM for a 1.3x increase in RAM speed. ARMv8.4…
And I fear that the GPU won’t change either, we’ll just get
more of them. 24 instead of 19, 48 instead of 38, and so on. Do this all at a higher clock rate and Apple might claim to the world that it’s a “generational change” for the industry.
Fuse four “effective M2s on 3nm” together instead of 2 and call it Ultra.
Apple must have screwed up bigtime to lose
so many (apparently unhappy) Apple Silicon Engineers, IDK what Apple did…
It seems like there is a
crippling “hole” in Apple’s Silicon Engineering team at the moment. (Hope I’m wrong.)
I think a gaping hole was blown in Apple’s Industry-leading Silicon Engineering team when the Chief Architect of Apple’s Silicon for 10 years,
Gerard Williams III, left Apple in 2019 and took quite a few key Apple Engineers with him to start
Nuvia. But Apple can’t buy Nuvia like it did Next because 1.) Gerard Williams doesn’t like working at Apple, and 2.) Because Qualcomm has
already snatched up Nuvia for a cool $1.2 Billion. Qualcomm has since pre-announced the new (allegedly “built from the ground up”)
Oryon CPU core technology.
If true, the problem is, as Apple spends time attracting new talent to replace that which left, and as Apple (hopefully) aggressively poaches Silicon Engineers from other chipmakers,
precious time is elapsing. Time its ruthless competitors are using to catch up to and perhaps surpass Apple.
Remember when many articles were written about how far Apple was ahead in its SoC designs and how long it would take for competitors to catch up?
It shook the industry when it was found out that the Apple A7 was 64-bit and was 200% faster than its predecessor in both CPU and graphics performance.
Apple beat ARM to ARMv-8 ISA and 64-bit. Apple was leapfrogging others in the industry and seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut that would be out ahead of everyone else for
years.
But then its industry-leapfrogging advancements
seem to have stalled. Will Apple Silicon become the next “
PowerPC” of the industry as competitors surpass it and leave it in the dust? I sure hope not.
ARM has beaten Apple to ARMv9.0A and ARM has beaten Apple with ray tracing hardware called the ARM Immortalis-G715 GPU core; Samsung has its Exynos 2200 SoC with ray tracing support in hardware
out now; Nvidia, and Intel (Arc) and AMD (Xclipse) and MediaTek all have hardware ray tracing in the works.
Qualcomm supposedly has ray tracing technology in hardware that can’t even be
carried out through software! (I don’t get it, but…)
And Qualcomm’s
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC — expected in the first half of 2023 — will not only have hardware accelerated ray tracing and DLSS, but one main ARMv9 CPU core in addition to multiple mid-tier and efficiency cores, on-die Natural Language Processing, an integrated Snapdragon X70 modem/radio
on the SoC instead of as a separate chip. It will also feature WiFi 7, hardware level Dynamic Spacial Audio processing and
dual Bluetooth for greater connectivity (like a better Apple H2 chip
integrated onto the SoC/
SIP), so-called “A.I assisted” sub-6GHz and mmWave cellular connections, and simultaneous dual-SIM support for switching phone calls between both SIMs at one time.
Unlike Samsung and others, Qualcomm
doesn’t really care what customers or platforms it sells its proprietary ARM-based SIP to. Qualcomm doesn’t make phones or computers. So it is expected that Windows will
completely migrate to ARM (just like Apple/Mac did) sooner than thought. The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
may be key for Microsoft. Or Intel may be key. I would
hate if Windows machines eventually compare to Apple Silicon Macs. 😡 Or if industry pundits say so whether they do or not!
The leaked news that Apple “planned a generational leap for the graphics processor in the latest version of its high-end smartphones, the iPhone 14 Pros” but had to abandon it
supposedly for reasons of unacceptable power consumption/battery drain (but who knows?) is a
troubling sign for Apple’s
silicon prowess.
Apple’s
own announcement that it has paused development on its own radio/modem chip in order to concentrate on Apple SIPs is also
troubling news for a company so big and capable.
It seems like working for Apple is no longer a “cause” but just a job. It seems like people don’t feel like they’re working to change the world and improve humanity but are working for a NASDAQ ticker symbol instead. “Vision” seems to be lost and Apple seems to be more of a corporation just like any other. That’s why Apple employees leaving to work for Microsoft or Google doesn’t feel like that much of a departure.
(I hope I’m completely wrong about
all of this. I’d never be happier to be wrong about anything in my life.)
Qualcomm “stole” —
In My Personal Opinion — technology developed at Apple when it acquired Nuvia and all the Apple engineers that came with it. There’s little doubt: a huge chunk of the technology now at Qualcomm was developed in Apple’s labs,
on Apple’s dime.
Qualcomm’s public statements are carefully worded to say that the former “Nuvia” started from scratch on the technologies it’s bringing to Qualcomm. (Yeah, right.)
There are lawsuits against Qualcomm over this from both Apple and ARM, but lawsuits “don’t make the donuts.”
Lawsuits aren’t the same as Apple — once again — shocking the entire industry with some entirely new, paradigm-shifting Silicon hardware breakthrough. (And 3nm isn’t it.)
