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devtesla wrote

The answer to "why are Apple's chips the best in the world" is that they have exclusive access to the latest and greatest assembly lines at TSMC, the best semiconductor foundry in the world. AMD and Nvidia have great CPUs and GPUs because they have secondary access to those lines after Apple.

I don't want to say that Apple has no expertise at building chips and it's all TSMC, but that's the core reason why Lol. And goddamn is TSMC important fr

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twovests OP wrote

Wait really? I'd love to read more. My scant interest understanding of silicon manufacturing makes this not make sense to me, but my understanding starts and ends at "TSMC makes the chips from the silicon wafers on commission."

Apple just winning a business gambit is a lot easier to place in my understanding of reality than "magic is real and Apple invented it"

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devtesla wrote (edited )

Looks like they've basically bought up the latest processes since 2014. Note that these "3nm" processes they're talking about are just marketing terms at this point, but the lower the nm process the better it is, generally.

Also apple not paying for defective chips is crazy. Part of the reason that cpus come in a billion different models is binning, the best ones are in the most expensive parts and the ones with defective cores turned off make it into the cheaper ones. Apple I guess doesn't deal with that at all.

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twovests OP wrote

haha, what the fuck. this is hilarious

i think apple does bin some, you usually get a few numbers of cores to choose from, but i believe that's only two tiers per processor.

i know it's still impressive to design your own silicon, but the magic is just monopoly? the "apple sucks forever" nerd in me stays winning

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devtesla wrote

I like Apple way more than you do, but it does really feel like the magic used to be design, software, and marketing and now it's almost entirely about being insanely good at sourcing parts. I can't argue with how good a lot of their products are, but I do wish there were a wider variety of interesting things those chips were going into

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