this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
129 points (96.4% liked)

Technology

59161 readers
1940 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
129
Intel Core Ultra 200V promises Arm-beating battery life without compatibility issues (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Apple does two things that are very expensive:

  1. They use a huge physical area of silicon for their high performance chips. The "Pro" line of M chips have a die size of around 280 square mm, the "Max" line is about 500 square mm, and the "Ultra" line is possibly more than 1000 square mm. This is incredibly expensive to manufacture and package.
  2. They pay top dollar to get the exclusive rights to TSMC's new nodes. They lock up the first year or so of TSMC's manufacturing capacity at any given node, at which point there is enough capacity to accommodate other designs from other TSMC clients (AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc.). That means you can just go out and buy an Apple device made from TSMC's latest node before AMD or Qualcomm have even announced the lines that will be using those nodes.

Those are business decisions that others simply can't afford to follow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

800 is reticle, they're not past that, it doesn't make sense.

They chiplet past 500, the economics break down otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They chiplet past 500

I don't know if I'm using the right vocabulary, maybe "die size" is the wrong way to describe it. But the Ultra line packages two Max SoCs with a high performance interconnect, so that the whole package does use about 1000 mm^2 of silicon.

My broader point is that much of Apple's performance comes from their willingness to actually use a lot of silicon area to achieve that performance, and it's very expensive to do so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

You could say total die size, but you wouldn't say die, that implies a single cut exposure of silicon.

But agreed, Apple just took all the tricks Intel dabbled with and turned them to 11, Intel was always too cheap because they had crazy volumes (and once upon a time had a good process) and there was no point.