<story><title>Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP</title><url>https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-architecture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daguava</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] &amp;quot;Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;How true is this? If they&amp;#x27;re on the money it&amp;#x27;s an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text>Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There&amp;#x27;s another factor that completely dominates. It&amp;#x27;s all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it&amp;#x27;s because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it&amp;#x27;s because they use TSMC&amp;#x27;s fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it&amp;#x27;s because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it&amp;#x27;s because TSMC&amp;#x27;s next fab isn&amp;#x27;t ready yet so they&amp;#x27;re still using the same fabs as M1.&lt;p&gt;These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I&amp;#x27;m waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it&amp;#x27;s really because they&amp;#x27;re all moving to TSMC N4.&lt;p&gt;I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel&amp;#x27;s fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn&amp;#x27;t doing too hot either.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase and A15 Based IP</title><url>https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-architecture</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daguava</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of claims of poached talent in the article, basically claiming [paraphrasing] &amp;quot;Apple, maintaining their stressful work env and not paying to shore that up lost some rockstars&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;How true is this? If they&amp;#x27;re on the money it&amp;#x27;s an excellent example of a talent retention miss leading to a demonstrable mediocrity in delivery.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InvaderFizz</author><text>Looking at another article from the same author[0], we&amp;#x27;ll have a pretty solid answer to the impact in September with the release of the A16. Apparently the A15 had very minimal CPU gains clock-for-clock over the A14.&lt;p&gt;To quote from that article:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I was very optimistic on Apple on the CPU front until I read this today. Now I&amp;#x27;m waiting to see how the A16 pans out for them to see if it&amp;#x27;s a two generation loss of progress, or just a single generation stumble.&lt;p&gt;0: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;semianalysis.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and?s=r&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;semianalysis.substack.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;apple-cpu-gains-grind-to...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>