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twovests OP wrote

Reply to comment by devtesla in I think it's funny that Apple's M-series chips are so good by twovests

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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