I miss Anand’s silicon reviews…

[Populus]

Especially with chips like the A19 or the M5, I miss his obsessive reviews in detail, explaining even the things I could barely understand… seeing the x-ray lithography, where each element is, how the Neural Accelerators are positioned into each GPU core… all of that.

If anyone knows of a similarly detailed reviews of Apple Silicon please let me know.

 

[Basic75]

You could ask https://chipsandcheese.com/ to cover more Apple chips, their analysis of other company's silicon is great.

 

[eas]

It's a real shame that Anandtech's old articles are gone now.

I've been thinking it might be worth the while of one of their old chip reviewers to do a kickstarter or patreon to fund deep dives on modern Apple Silicon. Or Mac Rumors could contract with one of them...

 

[Populus]

Well, at least I managed to get a bit more info about the silicon. The new A19 Pro is smaller than last years A18 Pro, and the regular A19 is even smaller, back to A12 size:

Apparently, this is not only due to the die shrink, from the N3E to N3P process (which would result in just a mere 4% less area), but also a complete rearrangement of the cores and the caché, to get a more compact design that drops the total area by a 10%.

Source: Semianalysis Twitter.

 

[tenthousandthings]

Especially with chips like the A19 or the M5, I miss his obsessive reviews in detail, explaining even the things I could barely understand… seeing the x-ray lithography, where each element is, how the Neural Accelerators are positioned into each GPU core… all of that.

If anyone knows of a similarly detailed reviews of Apple Silicon please let me know.

Anand Shimpi himself, of course, is one of the leaders guiding Apple silicon’s relentless advance, having been hired by Apple in 2014. His 2023 interview about that effort is a classic.

The most recent reviewer at Anandtech was hired by Tom’s Hardware, so they’ve taken up the mantle and they seem to have Apple’s respect. Still not the same as the heyday of Anandtech reviews authored by Ian Cutress, but not bad.

 

[bigglow]

Anand Shimpi himself, of course, is one of the leaders guiding Apple silicon’s relentless advance, having been hired by Apple in 2014. His 2023 interview about that effort is a classic.

The most recent reviewer at Anandtech was hired by Tom’s Hardware, so they’ve taken up the mantle and they seem to have Apple’s respect. Still not the same as the heyday of Anandtech reviews authored by Ian Cutress, but not bad.

It's actually a sign of the times.

Not enough views/clicks can justify their very niche interest.

 

[dmccloud]

Well, at least I managed to get a bit more info about the silicon. The new A19 Pro is smaller than last years A18 Pro, and the regular A19 is even smaller, back to A12 size:


Apparently, this is not only due to the die shrink, from the N3E to N3P process (which would result in just a mere 4% less area), but also a complete rearrangement of the cores and the caché, to get a more compact design that drops the total area by a 10%.

Which makes sense. As process nodes shrink, everything related to said nodes also shrinks, including interconnects between areas of the CPU/SoC. Conversely, this can also allow for adding components without increasing overall die size (e.g, the neural accelerators in each GPU core on the M5). Apple has been at the forefront of these advancements, largely because they are designing their SoCs from the ground up rather than licensing existing core designs from ARM and combining them LEGO-style.