Apple's Chip Lab: Now 15 Years Old With Thousands of Engineers

'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,' according to a new report from CNBC.
'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...'

The latest A17 Pro announced in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in September enables major leaps in features like computational photography and advanced rendering for gaming. 'It was actually the biggest redesign in GPU architecture and Apple silicon history,' said Kaiann Drance, who leads marketing for the iPhone. 'We have hardware accelerated ray tracing for the first time. And we have mesh shading acceleration, which allows game developers to create some really stunning visual effects.' That's led to the development of iPhone-native versions from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, The Division Resurgence and Capcom's Resident Evil 4.

Apple says the A17 Pro is the first 3-nanometer chip to ship at high volume. 'The reason we use 3-nanometer is it gives us the ability to pack more transistors in a given dimension. That is important for the product and much better power efficiency,' said the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji. 'Even though we're not a chip company, we are leading the industry for a reason.' Apple's leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance...

In a major shift for the semiconductor industry, Apple turned away from using Intel's PC processors in 2020, switching to its own M1 chip inside the MacBook Air and other Macs. 'It was almost like the laws of physics had changed,' Ternus said. 'All of a sudden we could build a MacBook Air that's incredibly thin and light, has no fan, 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping.' He said the newest MacBook Pro with Apple's most advanced chip, the M3 Max, 'is 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro we were making. And we were shipping that just two years ago.' Intel processors are based on x86 architecture, the traditional choice for PC makers, with a lot of software developed for it. Apple bases its processors on rival Arm architecture, known for using less power and helping laptop batteries last longer.

Apple's M1 in 2020 was a proving point for Arm-based processors in high-end computers, with other big names like Qualcomm — and reportedly AMD and Nvidia — also developing Arm-based PC processors. In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040.
Since Apple first debuted its homegrown semiconductors in 2010 in the iPhone 4, other companies started pursuing their own custom semiconductor development, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

CNBC reports that Apple is also reportedly working on its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. Apple's Srouji wouldn't comment on 'future technologies and products' but told CNBC 'we care about cellular, and we have teams enabling that.'

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