[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!

[stouset]

You are taking crazy pills. Making a high performance chip requires more than just having a bunch of talented and experienced engineers. Is it a necessary requirement? Sure! But it’s far from sufficient.

Apple brought on PA Semi and then slowly iterated on actually shipping hardware for years. They didn’t hire PA Semi and have a best-in-class product on the first go.