Rumors about Apple’s abandonment of Intel processors had been around for years before Apple announced its decision in June 2020. But according to a former Apple engineer, the company made progress in this area long before most people don’t realize it.
In a discussion thread detailed on Twitter, Shac Ron, who worked as a senior engineer at Apple from 2007 to 2017, shed light on the history of the M1 chip and Apple’s efforts to develop its own alternative to Intel processors. The discussion thread was born in response to a tweet from David Kanter, expert in machine learning, which claimed that the performance of the M1 chip was much more related to its cache than its architecture.
In response, Ron explained that Apple started work on what would become the M1 ten years ago, in 2010, when it contacted ARM to develop a custom 64-bit instruction set (ISA) architecture. At this point, according to Ron, ARM hadn’t even finished designing its own basic chip that it was going to license to third parties.
The premise here is wrong. arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches. https://t.co/8wZxy8c9vr
– Shac Ron ₪ (@stuntpants) January 5, 2021
Ron added that when Apple launched this 64-bit chip – the Apple A7 in 2013 for the iPhone 5S – rivals Samsung and Qualcomm were taken aback by its performance. The A7 was the first 64-bit system-on-a-chip (SoC) to be launched in a consumer smartphone, and Apple claimed at the time that it was twice as fast and offered twice the graphics performance of its predecessor, the A6.
Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided.
M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago.
– Shac Ron ₪ (@stuntpants) January 5, 2021
Ron added more details, claiming that Apple’s insistence on a highly efficient “OoO” (out-of-order) architecture with reduced clocks and the ability to add more and more cores to the chips gave the company an advantage. Indeed, Ron then asserts that “M1 performance is not due to ARM ISA, ARM ISA is due to Apple’s core performance plans ten years ago ».
Apple is still waiting for the technology to be mature
The discussion thread is enlightening, as it shows how far ahead Apple was in organizing its processor change. Apple often plans major changes years in advance – the iPad was in development in 2004 at the latest, six years before launch – and is very happy wait until the technology is ready before launching a product.
Given the M1’s outstanding performance in the latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, it can be said that the wait was worth it.
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