Apple just announced that its Macintosh PC line will be moving from Intel CPUs to its own chip designs.
Apple today announced it will transition the Mac to its world-class custom silicon to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies. Developers can now get started updating their apps to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of Apple silicon in the Mac. This transition will also establish a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire ecosystem.
Apple today also introduced macOS Big Sur, the next major release of macOS, which delivers its biggest update in more than a decade and includes technologies that will ensure a smooth and seamless transition to Apple silicon. Developers can easily convert their existing apps to run on Apple silicon, taking advantage of its powerful technologies and performance. And for the first time, developers can make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.
To help developers get started with Apple silicon, Apple is also launching the Universal App Quick Start Program, which provides access to documentation, forums support, beta versions of macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12, and the limited use of a Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac development system based on Apple’s A12Z Bionic System on a Chip (SoC).
Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years. Apple will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come, and has exciting new Intel-based Macs in development. The transition to Apple silicon represents the biggest leap ever for the Mac.
Well, not really. The leaps from Motorola’s 68000 series to PowerPC chips, its move from legacy Mac OS to the FreeBSD/NeXTSTEP-based OS X, and the transition away from PowerPC to Intel, were all probably bigger leaps. But their transition away from Intel is still pretty big.
The chip they’re moving doing is based on ARM, but that’s only a small part of the story:
The A12Z chip that Apple is currently using in its latest LiDAR iPad Pro and its first generation Apple Silicon chip in the Mac mini developer transition kit does incorporate ARM CPU cores. But that ARM Architecture CPU is not the most significant reason Apple is moving away from Intel’s chips on Macs.
Apple alluded to this in referring to its own custom silicon as being an “SoC,” or System on a Chip. Over the past decade, Apple has developed a series of SoCs that incorporate essentially an entire logic board of chips that a typical PC would require into a single chip that can be mass produced and used across multiple devices from its iPhone, to iPad, to Apple TV and even HomePod.
The primary advantage of this integration was power consumption. ARM supplied licensed CPU reference design cores that provided leading compute performance per watt, leading Apple to make ARM the center core of its SoC designs. ARM cores are also the basis for Apple’s M-series components that monitor data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer to efficiently track how a device is moving over time.
Snip.
In some respects, Apple’s use of ARM cores in its SoCs is similar to its use of Unix in the OS itself. Both are effectively specifications that standardize the operations of low level technology layers. In the same way that Macs are more than just Unix systems, Apple’s SoCs are more than just ARM processors.
As with Qualcomm’s modems, the customizations, optimizations, and additional layers of proprietary work that Apple adds to its A-series SoCs results in a package that’s significantly more valuable than its base components.
That reality is reflected in Apple’s custom silicon being a lot more than just an “ARM chip,” and helps to explain why Apple’s SoCs have increasingly outperformed other ARM-based SoCs developed by Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, and others.
Who’s going to fab the chips? Almost certainly TSMC, which has been fabbing iPhone chips since 2014, and which has lapped Intel in process technology.
Could Apple build their own fab? With a market cap of over 1.5 trillion and $192.8 billion cash on hand, they’re one of the few companies that could without making it a “bet your company” proposition.
But I don’t think they will.
Keep in mind, TSMC just broke ground on a new 5nm, 300mm Taiwanese fab expected to cost NT$500 billion, which works out to some $16.9 billion. They also plan to build a another 5nm fab in Arizona for $12 billion. That’s a lot of capacity for Apple (one of TSMC’s biggest customers, if not the biggest) to take advantage of. (TSMC has dozens of existing fabs, but not all are equipped for the cutting edge process technology Apple needs.)
Actually, Apple already owns a fab, a former Maxim facility at 3725 N. First St. San Jose, California, which it bought in 2015. Weirdly enough, you can’t find any information about it after 2015. Could they retrofit it to make their new SoCs? The older a fab is, the less likely it is to get retrofitted for new technology, for a variety of reasons. If they weren’t already using it for CPU production, they probably wouldn’t start now. But since they only paid $18.2 million for 70,000 square feet of valuable Silicon Valley real estate, I doubt that concerns them much.
Fabbing their own CPUs has a long-rumored move on Apple’s part, which has been building up its chip design capabilities for over a decade with the acquisitions of fabless design companies like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit, Passif Semiconductor and part of Dialog Semiconductor. With its own CPUs, Apple is finally getting the complete end-to-end control of its computing platform its long sought.
According to Apple, “With the translation technology of Rosetta 2, users will be able to run existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated, including those with plug-ins. Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux. Developers can also make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.” Apple’s previous emulation transitions worked pretty well, but were far from seamless. In theory, well-written Mac software should only require a recompile to work properly on Macs using Apple’s new chips. In practice, such transitions are always bumpy, and it will take a while to tune performance.