Apple's in-house chip design is the 'secret weapon' behind industry-beating performance

Apple's Vice President of Mac Product Marketing Tom Boger and Vice President of Platform Architecture Tim Millet talked about the new M4 line of chips used in recent Apple product updates in an interview with The Indian Express. The company believes doing its own chip design gives it "a tremendous strategic advantage, said Millet.

"We are not a merchant silicon company," he added in encapsulating Apple's advantage. "We do not build chips and sell them to other [companies]."

By creating chips custom-built for the devices they will go into, the company avoids compromises in overall performance. Boger added that "no other platform can touch our power performance per watt. That's the tangible benefit to users."

Industry-leading chip innovation

Boger noted the dramatic increases in performance year-over-year as successive generations of Apple Silicon are released, outpacing the progress rate of the rest of the industry. The new M4, Apple says, brings customers "the world's fastest CPU core, delivering the industry's best single-threaded performance."

The two executives say there is more to the success of Apple Silicon than just delivering speed with minimal energy usage. "We take advantage of the three major components — the architecture, the design, and the process technology," said Miller.

"Our fourth tool, really our secret weapon, I think, is our ability to co-design these amazing chips with the system teams and the product designers as they are imagining possibilities." Miller pointed to the new M4 Mac mini as an example of this.

"The opportunity was for us and for the design team to be able to come together and build this incredible new platform," he told the newspaper. "There is no way that machine could have come to life without that collaboration. And that is really what Apple is all about."

Miller noted that competing chip manufacturers "can't just go to the latest cutting edge technology like the second generation, three nanometer, but we (Apple) benefit from it in a way that we believe it is worth it. It delivers for us and our products and our customers we are trying to leave nothing on the table."

Boger added that it was rare to see the "pace of innovation year after year after year," noting that the first Apple Silicon chip debuted just four years ago. "That is the promise. That is a commitment we make to our teams to deliver innovations as they are available to us," he said.

The rise of the Neural Engine

Commenting on the rise of artificial intelligence in PC s and Apple's response of Apple Intelligence, Boger noted that there have been "intelligent" features in Macs for years. He noted that Apple first included a Neural Engine in its iPhone chip designs in 2017.

Millet added that "this was inspired by our recognition of the importance of computational photography. We were seeing the amazing research that folks up in the University of Toronto were demonstrating [that] these new neural networks were capable of doing image recognition beyond the capacity of humans, or at least matching, and they were headed on a trajectory that was clear."

"And so we pounced on the opportunity to build that embedded capability into our camera processors for the phone," Millet said. Boger added that the Neural Engine was a core part of the first M1 chip.

"We have a great architecture for AI, and we also have developers taking advantage of Apple silicon to offer our customers intelligent features," he said. "So the M Series chips were always built for AI."

Boger said that his team saw "an interesting paper" in 2017 that discussed transformer networks, now the engine behind Large Language Models (LLMs) used in AI. Boger's team saw that the technology could have a major impact on the Neural Engine, and introduced them into the first M-series chips.

"It shows you the diligence that we spend all our time trying to figure out where the ball is moving," said Miller. "We try to make sure we are there before it gets there."

Innovation driven by users

Boger said in the interview that Apple Silicon continues to push boundaries in performance and energy efficiency "because that's what our customers do." He used the M4 MacBook Pro line as an example.

"For instance, you run the most demanding workload while you have it plugged in, and then you unplug it [and] it is going to give you the exact same performance."

In noting the addition of the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, Millet said that the memory bandwidth is a key differentiator from the regular M4. "M4 Max has effectively about twice the memory bandwidth of M4 Pro, [which] will help someone who was really pushing the edge for a very, very large model."

Millet said that Apple works closely with software partners "to look for all the best opportunities to accelerate not just generic benchmarks, which we often get judged by, but more importantly by the workloads that we are actually delivering to our customers."

"We know what the hardware system and thermal design will look like, and we understand what the process technology nodes are, and we aggressively pursue our best silicon options," Millet said. "I have been doing this for more than 30 years [and] it is the best situation to be in."