At apple's high-energy spring conference, every time a new product is introduced, I silently give a comment in my heart: iPhone SE, regular upgrade; iPad Air, regular upgrade; M1 Ultra, wow so strong; Mac Studio, have money all one.
Only when the Studio Display appeared, I did not make an evaluation, but silently turned my eyes to the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra charging on the side: "Baby, just now, the performance of a monitor exceeded yours." 」
What does the A13 in Studio Display bring to it?
What attracted me most to Studio Display was not the gorgeous and solid parameters, but the A13 bionic chip it was equipped with, and the addition of A13 gave it three major functions: character centering, spatial audio, and "Hey Siri".
With the release of the iPad Air (fifth generation), character centering has become the standard of the entire iPad series, and studio Display, which uses the A13 chip, brings this function to the desktop. In the video conference, the center of the character can ensure that the participant is always in the middle of the picture, if someone joins or leaves the screen, the lens perspective will be expanded or closer accordingly.
In addition to Apple's official "FaceTime Call", "Flying Book", "DingTalk", Zoom and other office software we commonly use are adapted to this feature, as long as you actually experience it, you can feel a kind of unspeakable comfort.
The second is the improvement of audio, with the computing power of the A13 bionic chip, the Studio Display's high-fidelity speaker system can achieve spatial audio, which Apple calls "the sound quality ceiling of the Mac family".
The last feature is "Hey, Siri". With the A13 chip, Studio Display can privately detect the "Hey, Siri" wake-up command on the device around the clock and at low power, but Apple spokesman Alex Bender said in an interview that the "Hey, Siri" function on Studio Display needs to be connected to the Mac.
In addition to "Hey, Siri", the aforementioned character center and spatial audio are also turned on for all compatible Macs, with the oldest supporting MacBook Pro until 2016 (because macOS Monterey 12.3 needs to be run).
Although it is not a shopping guide, it is also mentioned that Studio Display is also suitable for Windows computers, but it will lack functions such as character center, true color display, "Hey, Siri", and functions that require firmware updates are also unusable. So, if you're a Windows user, this monitor isn't for you.
Whether it's spatial audio from a 6-speaker array, centering of characters in the monitoring screen at all times during a video call, or the "Hey, Siri" feature that detects voice commands around the clock, so that all compatible Macs can use the full power of Studio Display, the computing power of the A13 Bionic chip is required.
Adding a "second" chip is nothing new
We have long been accustomed to chips for mobile phones, computers and other devices, and in order to make relatively traditional devices more intelligent and easy to use, Apple is not the first manufacturer to stuff chips into devices.
At the 2021 CES conference, Sony released its blockbuster new TV, which has one thing in common, that is, they are equipped with a new graphics processor: the XR cognitive chip. If there is one word to describe this chip, it is "smarter".
After years of iteration, the XR cognitive chip can not only analyze and optimize the brightness, contrast and color of the picture, improve the perception, but also go further and optimize specific areas in real time to make the visual focus of the picture more vivid and clear.
At the same time, the XR cognitive chip can also convert any sound into 3D stereo surround sound, analyze the position of the sound source on the screen in real time, and align the presented sound source with the picture content, so as to obtain a more realistic sense of presence.
In addition to displays, we may be more familiar with the independent chips of mobile phone manufacturers for camera image differentiation: Xiaomi's surging C1, Vivo's V1, OPPO's Mariana X and so on.
▲ OPPO self-developed NPU Mariana X
Taking the professional image chip V1 on the vivo X70 Pro+ as an example, it can pre-process the data obtained by the sensor before the main chip, speed up image processing, and bring better imaging results. It also allows the phone's image characteristics to be previewed in real time (such as night mode), and what you see is what you get.
In addition to the performance improvement, V1 also makes the camera and video more power-saving, better effect, lower power consumption, making vivo X70 Pro+ a veritable image flagship.
In the field of charging, Xiaomi uses the surging P1 chip to achieve single-cell 120W charging, supports multi-stop transformer, and has a higher degree of integration than the traditional fast-charging chip, and also increases the battery capacity and charging speed under the premise of maintaining the volume of the mobile phone.
These standalone chips allow devices to have a controllable size, better performance, and lower power consumption. Manufacturers who use hardware such as 8K, Mini-LED, 100 million pixels, and 100x zoom to compete for performance have been brought to a new track.
The extravagant A13 is the strongest fortress of self-confidence
When the hardware parameters such as the resolution and material of the display reach the bottleneck (or the cost is too high), it is indeed a good development direction to use the chip to let the user have a better experience. Just like Sony has made the XR cognitive chip a major selling point for TVs, from picture quality and sound quality to performance power consumption, there has been a lot of improvement.
It's no surprise that Apple added chips to the display, but even so, the A13 bionic chip is a bit extravagant.
The A13 Bionic chip was first introduced to the iPhone 11 series, with a 6-core CPU and a 4-core graphics processor, and later also on the iPad series and the second-generation iPhone SE. Studio Display only uses it to achieve functions such as "Hey, Siri", obviously it is not fully utilized, is it really to clear inventory?
First of all, of course, it is not to clear inventory, because Apple's current CEO Cook is indeed an "inventory buster". In the biography of Tim Cook, it is written that after Cook joined Apple for 7 months, he shortened the inventory period of Apple products from 30 days to 6 days, and in a very short period of time, he completely reformed Apple's operating system. By 1999, the inventory period had been reduced to just 2 days. Even in 6 days, the iPhone produced on Monday was sold on Sunday.
Redesigning a new product to use more raw materials for production, this kind of noodles with more water, more water and more noodles, is not something that "inventory busters" will do. The biggest reason to use A13 is still in AI computing power.
As long as you pay attention to the mobile phone processor, you will find that whether it is Qualcomm Snapdragon or Apple A series, the CPU improvement is gradually toothpaste, while the AI computing power still maintains a significant increase. The latest A15 bionic chip is also a significant improvement of more than 40% compared to the previous generation. Nowadays, every time we unlock the phone, wake up the voice assistant, and press the shutter, there is the help of AI computing, and the character is in the middle of the function, which requires powerful AI computing power.
On Apple's official website, we can see the oldest devices supported by these functions: iPhone 6s (A9) and above models, which can achieve unplugged "Hey, Siri" voice wake-up; spatial audio requires iPhone 7 (A10) and above; and the character center function that appears with the iPad Pro equipped with M1 chip requires the ninth generation iPad (A13) and later models.
It seems that the A13 Bionic chip is the minimum configuration that can meet all needs.
Of course, Apple can also redesign a chip for the function of these displays, but compared to increasing the cost of research and development and opening a new pipeline, it just "coincides" that the iPhone SE has released the capacity of the A13 chip, using the 7nm process and a more mature old design, the cost may be lower, even if there is a very large performance redundancy.
▲ The iPhone SE (third generation) upgraded the previous generation of A13 chips to A15
Compared with the interoperability of iPad, iPhone and even Mac, it is rare to use the same processor on "non-smart" devices that cannot install apps, such as monitors, but this is not the first time Apple has done so. Back in 2017, homePod had an A8 processor for real-time software modeling, detect placement, bass management, and noisy environment recognition of "hey, Siri" commands. "It was actually equipped with an A8 chip" was a surprise for many netizens at that time.
As the M1 Ultra continues to be cold at heights with doubled performance, we can't help but sigh that the chip is Apple's strongest fortress. If the M1 chip is downgraded to the iPad, there is also the layout of the future iPad productivity in it. Even if it follows the fuselage design of 5 years ago, it also allows the iPhone SE to carry the latest and strongest A15 chip, even if it can compete with other flagship chips today, the A13 chip that is still crammed into the display is using a huge performance excess, interpreting what is called "having a chip is what can be done".
▲ The two generations of iPhone SE have hardly changed in appearance
Huawei's recently released MatePad Paper, which uses the Kirin 820E processor, is an absolute strong in the field of electric paper books; the surging P1 that realizes a single battery cell 120W fast charging on the Xiaomi 12 Pro is now also applied to the Redmi K50 Pro; Li Jie, president of the OPPO Find product line, said that the Mariana chip will continue to be developed, and the debugging work of the Tianji chip and the Mariana chip is also underway.
Although it is not as good as Apple's thousands of dollars on the display, we still look forward to the day in the future, domestic manufacturers can also have this confidence from the chip construction, the strongest fortress.