CNBC has gone inside a lab where Apple designs custom chips that power new Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Apple TVs, HomePods and more.
At its Silicon Valley headquarters, in a non-descript room filled with a couple hundred buzzing machines and a handful of engineers in lab coats, Apple is designing the custom chips that power its most popular products.
Apple first debuted homegrown semiconductors in the iPhone 4 in 2010. As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple’s own silicon, ending the company’s 15-plus years of reliance on Intel.
In November, CNBC visited Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, the first journalists allowed to film inside one of the company’s chip labs. We got a rare chance to talk with the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji, about the company’s push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
Apple’s silicon team has grown to thousands of engineers working across labs all over the world, including in Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K. and Japan. Within the U.S., the company has facilities in Silicon Valley, San Diego and Austin, Texas…
More than 90% of the world’s advanced chips are made by TSMC in Taiwan, which leaves Apple and the rest of the industry vulnerable to the China threat of invasion.
Apple is at least looking to bring some of that manufacturing to the U.S. It’s committed to becoming the largest customer at TSMC’s coming fab in Arizona. And on Thursday Apple announced it will be the first and largest customer of the new $2 billion Amkor manufacturing and packaging facility being built in Peoria, Arizona. Amkor will package Apple silicon produced at TSMC’s Arizona fab.
MacDailyNews Take: Bring on the M3 Ultra!
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It’s astonishing how good the M chips are. I just picked up a very simple base M2 Mac mini. 8GB/256GB…..second hand for only $500 Canadian. Thinking it’s going to be OK for low level stuff. It actually leaves my 2017 24GB, i7 with top end NVDIA graphics (for the time) in the dust. Does all the games I used to play with the graphics card in my old Mac. And while translating software for PC to MAC using Rosetta!
Now if only I could connect the mini to my iMac screen.
Maybe Luna display can help? https://astropad.com/product/lunadisplay/