Interesting article here, but a lot of the stuff laid at Apple's feet here did not begin at Apple. Yes, they implemented it in a high power design, and yes, they did a great job, and it is really performing well, but all of this has been common in cell phone chips available from various vendors for over a decade.
Multiple cores, multiple DSPs, ISPs, GPUs, secure enclaves, encryption engines, high speed serial controllers, ADC/DAC, plus all the stuff to support the cellular modem such as viterbi encoders/decoders. All these little specialized blocks all embedded on the chip, and the DDR soldered directly to the top of it.
This has been a common technique for over a decade. Why isn't your phone as fast as the M1? How long do you think the M1 would run on your cell phone battery? Everything is an engineering trade off.
So Apple basically took the last decade of smart phone architecture, and blew it up with more transistors, to accomplish more processing throughput.
They didn't invent the technique of hybrid multi-core silicon by any stretch of the imagination.
You can go back to the mid 1990s and find single chip 56K dialup modems with a general purpose CPU, a DSP, onboard RAM, onboard NOR FLASH, and a half dozen dedicated modem hardware blocks, all on a single die.
Apple is about three years ahead of any other mobile chip maker. Sure, it's the same type of SoC and general architecture, but somehow Apple's CPU and GPU designs are miles ahead of anyone else.
Multiple cores, multiple DSPs, ISPs, GPUs, secure enclaves, encryption engines, high speed serial controllers, ADC/DAC, plus all the stuff to support the cellular modem such as viterbi encoders/decoders. All these little specialized blocks all embedded on the chip, and the DDR soldered directly to the top of it.
This has been a common technique for over a decade. Why isn't your phone as fast as the M1? How long do you think the M1 would run on your cell phone battery? Everything is an engineering trade off.
So Apple basically took the last decade of smart phone architecture, and blew it up with more transistors, to accomplish more processing throughput.
They didn't invent the technique of hybrid multi-core silicon by any stretch of the imagination.
You can go back to the mid 1990s and find single chip 56K dialup modems with a general purpose CPU, a DSP, onboard RAM, onboard NOR FLASH, and a half dozen dedicated modem hardware blocks, all on a single die.