[whynotminot]

> Apple Silicon was great because Apple had invested huge amounts of resources for a decade on smartphone processors first, not because they had some kind of geniuses on the project.

Right, and the guys who learned all the hard-won lessons along the way walked out the door to start a company, bringing along expert knowledge of Apple's designs and processes. And then Qualcomm bought them.

So on a surface level it seems implausible that QC could produce such a chip. But when you zoom out and go "oh, Qualcomm effectively bought Apple's senior chip engineers" it starts to make more sense.

It would be like if Qualcomm's top modem engineers started a company, which Apple bought. And then a couple years later Apple's long-running modem project mysteriously turned a corner and was ready to launch an exceptional modem. Like yeah, no kidding.

So yes, we need to see independent benchmarks and make sure it's not hype. But it's not so unbelievable that Apple's former top engineers could also produce a good a chip for another company. There's nothing magical about the Apple office--it's the engineers.

[brokencode]

Engineering something as complex as a CPU is a long process regardless of how smart and experienced your engineers are. I mean, you can certainly speed it up with great talent, but there is still long and hard work to do with any difficult engineering challenge.

I’m not saying there’s something special about Apple other than the scale of their investment over a long period of time.

It’s the same deal for Qualcomm and their 5G modems. Apple no doubt has hired many talented engineers to make a custom 5G modem. But Qualcomm’s modem is still the best one around. It’s hard to catch up because Qualcomm has been investing heavily in that space for a very long time.

Again, that’s not to say Apple won’t ever catch up. Just that I wouldn’t expect that their first effort will be better than Qualcomm’s modems.

[whynotminot]

Nuvia has been working on this tech for years before being snapped up by Qualcomm. And before that, those same engineers had worked on Apple silicon for years. Why do you keep thinking this is an overnight thing?

[stouset]

For starters, the claim that they were working on high performance computing before getting bought.

Taken at face value, that story is hard to reconcile with a sudden pivot to mobile.

[whynotminot]

To be fair it’s a bit of a myth that only mobile cares about efficiency and thermal management. It is definitely a factor for HPC and server too.

Apple scaled iPhone first designs up to the M* Ultra chips. Going from HPC to a mid wattage laptop is definitely serious work, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Especially with ARM.

[stouset]

Apple clearly iterated on that process over the course of a decade and multiple generations of chips, eventually achieving that outcome.

[whynotminot]

Am I taking crazy pills?

The whole point of this thread is that those same Apple engineers made these Qualcomm chips.

Yes. Apple iterated over many, many years. Learning so much along the way about how to make performant, efficient ARM designs.

And then a bunch of the most important of those guys left to start their own company.

And then Qualcomm bought that company.

Y’all are acting like a few college kids from Stanford made Qualcomm a new CPU over their summer internship. “It takes longer than that to make a good CPU.” Yah no shit!