[timmaxw]

What are all those transistors doing?

I've heard the cache is the biggest part. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17, the A17 has 72MB of cache. Cache is typically SRAM. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_random-access_memory, a single bit of SRAM typically uses 6 transistors, but it could be anywhere from 4 to 10. So that's between 2.3B and 5.7B transistors for the cache.

That leaves about 1B transistors for each of the 12 cores (6 CPU + 6 GPU). The instruction set is a few hundred instructions. Surely it doesn't take millions of transistors to implement each instruction. Other than the cache, which parts of the processor need millions of transistors?

[Shawnj2]

Apple has a bunch of device function hardware in the SOC like the SSD controller, the security chip, the GPU, the neural engine, etc. a decent amount of which probably uses hardware logic.