Introduction
Over the years, the advantages of Apple's products in the chip field have become more and more prominent, which has gradually made the public realize that Apple has also formed a broad moat in the chip field.
Li Ping | author
Ordinary | edit
Stonestone Business Review | source
Apple's advantages in the field of chips are becoming more and more prominent.
Previously, Apple held a spring 2022 new product conference, in addition to the new color of the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, the new iPhone SE and Mac Studio and Studio Display and other 5 new products, the M1 Ultra, known as the earth's strongest desktop processor, has also attracted global attention.
As the fourth generation of the M1 series, the M1 Ultra uses the new UltraFusion package architecture to interconnect two M1 Max chips for higher performance and lower power consumption. According to reports, M1 Ultra contains up to 114 billion transistors, supports up to 128GB of unified memory, and has 20 core CPU, 64 core GPU, 8 times faster than M1. In addition, under the high performance, the M1 Ultra's performance power consumption is 90% lower than today's 16-core computers.
The release of the M1 Ultra not only enriched the processor camp of Apple M1, but also allowed Apple to say goodbye to its "old friend" Intel more calmly. An increasingly powerful Apple chip empire is also changing the competitive landscape of the global semiconductor industry.
1
Apple was also subject to people
Apple's core-making program began as early as the 1990s.
In 1997, after Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple who had been expelled, was invited back to the company, he found that the personal computer market at this time had been dominated by the Wintel (Windows & Intel) alliance, and Apple's market share was pitifully small. In the face of the combination of software and hardware of Microsoft and Intel, Jobs, together with IBM and Motorola, established the AMI PowerPC (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance to jointly develop and launch PowerPC chips in order to regain the dominance of the PC market.
According to the original concept of the AMI Alliance, the PowerPC chip is mainly jointly developed by IBM and Motorola, and Apple is responsible for assembling the PowerPC chip to the personal computer, and the chip is also provided to companies outside the alliance.
The PowerPC chip adopts IBM Power's lite RISC chip architecture, and inherits the powerful computing performance of IBM's high-end server workstation, as well as Motorola's top chip technology reserves, which has the advantages of good scalability, convenience and flexibility. However, PowerPC chips also have disadvantages such as high energy consumption and high price.
In the end, Apple's Mac computer equipped with PowerPC chips was snapped up by Apple fans, but it did not continue to expand its market share.
In fact, except for Apple computers, the proportion of other manufacturers using PowerPC chips is extremely low. This creates a contradiction between R&D investment and sales profitability.
For IBM, supplying chips to Apple required huge investments in the development of chipsets, compilers and other supporting technologies, but because Apple computers were a niche market at the time, IBM's market share of PC chips was very limited, and it was difficult to make money. Apple has publicly criticized IBM for having problems with its supply, and believes that the Power Mac G5 chip produced by IBM cannot be used in laptops due to heat dissipation and power consumption problems. There is constant disagreement between the two sides.
Although it is known as joint research and development, the research and development of PowerPC chips mainly relies on IBM and is not led by Apple. With disproportionate inputs, IBM and Motorola had to shift some of their design efforts to embedded PowerPC chips in automotive manufacturing, rather than just focusing on apple Macs. Jobs himself complained about it, but there was nothing he could do about it.
In 2003, when Jobs introduced the Mac with a PowerPC processor, he publicly stated that the frequency of the processor would reach 3GHz within twelve months. But in fact, after 24 months, the 3GHz processor is still missing, which also gives Jobs the first taste of key components being controlled by people.
In 2005, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars on PowerPC chips, Apple decided to step out of the AMI Alliance and switch to Intel. On June 6, 2006, Apple officially announced that it would use Intel processors in Macintosh computers, abandon the PowerPC architecture, and end a decade-long partnership with IBM. In this regard, Jobs said: "Intel will develop the most powerful processor products in the future, and I believe that Intel technology will help us build the best personal computers in the next decade." ”
However, the honeymoon period between the two sides did not last long, and the cooperation soon cracked. On the one hand, Intel's "squeezed toothpaste" development schedule is difficult to keep pace with the fast-paced Mac, and Apple's new product release plans are often subject to issues such as Intel chip latency and security. On the other hand, perhaps in the powerPC chip era, the lesson of being subject to people is too profound, and Apple has never given up its efforts to achieve "chip autonomy". So while Apple agreed to move its Mac platform to Intel's x86, it made plans internally for other products that didn't involve Intel.
In fact, Apple's cooperation with Intel has been full of contradictions. As early as 1997, Jobs asked for a "maximum customer price" when he met with Intel's then chief operating officer Andy Grove, but Grove flatly refused, so Apple only worked with Intel for a year at that time.
In this regard, Grove once said: "Since then, in Jobs's eyes, Intel has been worthless, no matter what we do, we can't change his mind." ”
According to former Intel CEO Paul Oudenin, Intel had the opportunity to become a processor supplier for Apple's first-generation iPhone, and Apple expressed strong interest in one of Intel's chips at the time, but the price proposed was much lower than expected, and Intel lost the order. In the end, Apple chose an ARM architecture chip from Samsung.
It is not difficult to see that as the bosses in their respective fields, the cooperation between Apple and Intel is full of bargaining contradictions. For Apple, which attaches great importance to supply chain security, Intel in a monopoly position has always been an insecure factor. After all, for Apple, which adheres to the integration of soft and hard, the chip is the most core hardware, and self-research has become a must.
In the end, when Apple was revived with the hot sales of iPhones, iPads and other products, it immediately opened the road of self-development of mobile phone chips. At the same time, Intel lost the order for Apple's mobile phone because of the price problem, and completely lost the opportunity to change the world.
2
The road of mobile phone chip self-development
Although the PowerPC processor withdrew in failure, it really opened the prelude to Apple's self-developed chip. While Jobs fully recognized the importance of chips, he also understood the difficulty of chip self-development. To this end, Apple chose to start from the mobile phone chip that is still in the early stage of the development of the industry, and continues to cooperate with Intel in the field of desktop chips.
In 2010, Apple launched the first self-developed mobile phone chip Apple A4, the main frequency crossed the 650MHz of the ARM public version at that time, breaking through to 1GHz in one fell swoop, and then this chip was successively installed on the original iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4.
It turns out that the iPhone 4 equipped with the A4 chip has become a milestone in the history of Apple's smartphone development, and the iPad has almost become synonymous with tablets. Since then, A series chips have been the representative of high-performance chips on mobile platforms with generations of improvements in process process, CPU architecture and GPU core.
After standing on the mobile phone chip, Apple's chip research and development has also expanded from mobile phone tablets to smart watches, true wireless headphones and other categories, such as the S series chips on the Apple Watch and the W series of wireless Bluetooth chips.
In terms of chip architecture, Apple's A series, S series, and W series chips all use ARM architecture. Compared with Intel's x86 architecture, ARM has the advantages of low energy consumption, low cost, and high performance, which has a significant impact on consumer electronics, especially longer battery life, thinner and fanless design, which allows ARM-based Apple chips to gain advantages that other manufacturers can hardly match in terms of system stability and endurance.
More important than the performance improvement, Apple has greatly built the wall of Apple's closed ecology through chip self-research, so that the Apple ecosystem can more smoothly achieve internal circulation.
The self-developed chip quickly brought positive incentives to Apple. Because each generation of the A-Series has a significant performance advantage over other mobile phone chips in the same period, this gives each generation of iPhones a more advanced integrated experience than the flagship machines of the same period - although Apple is selling more and more expensive, it is selling better and better.
In 2017, the launch of Apple's A11 Bonic bionic chip made smart phones step into the ERA of AI, and the addition of neural engines further enhanced the full range of functions and experiences of mobile phones through algorithms, such as AR, face recognition, and image synthesis. At the same time, A11 is also the most autonomous generation of A-series processors in Apple's history, including self-developed CPUs, self-developed GPUs, self-developed ISPs, self-developed decoders, etc., especially the first time to use their own designed GPU cores.
However, due to the lack of technology accumulation and patent in the field of communications, Apple still needs to purchase baseband chips at this time. In the field of baseband chips, Qualcomm is in a leading position in terms of technical strength and market share, but there are huge patent licensing lawsuits with Apple. To this end, Apple chose to purchase baseband processors from both Intel and Qualcomm at the same time.
Intel has once again become Apple's "pig teammate." Later, consumers reported that the iPhone 8 equipped with Intel processors was significantly weaker than the Qualcomm version in terms of Internet performance, so Apple could only reduce the speed of all mobile phones.
What is more serious is that in 2019, because Intel's 5G baseband chip is difficult to produce, the release time of Apple's 5G iPhone was forced to be postponed for a year, and Apple once again tasted that the core technology was subject to people.
In the end, Apple had to shake hands with Qualcomm and make peace, from the iPhone 12 generation began to fully return to the Qualcomm Snapdragon baseband, completely abandoning Intel.
Losing Apple, a big customer, has also completely bogged down Intel's baseband business. In the end, Intel sold the mobile phone baseband business to Apple for $1 billion, and Apple further increased the self-development ratio of mobile phone chips.
As of now, Apple's iPhone 13 series still uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon X60 5G modem. According to the latest news, Apple plans to let TSMC manufacture 5G iPhone basebands starting in 2023, which is expected to be officially unveiled in the iPhone 15 series. It is said that Apple hopes to launch a "high-end baseband", whose performance will far exceed Qualcomm products, so the research and development cycle is longer.
The industry generally believes that with Apple's excellent vertical integration capabilities and software and hardware optimization capabilities on the product side, there are conditions and strengths to improve and optimize Intel's baseband chip business, solve technical shortcomings such as signal problems, and then integrate A-series processors and baseband processors, making them perfect for Apple products and getting rid of Qualcomm's constraints. This will further strengthen Apple's dominance in the supply chain.
3
Say goodbye to Intel once and for all
Perhaps it is the 5G baseband chip problem that makes Apple completely despair of Intel, at the WWDC developer conference in June 2020, Cook publicly announced that in the future, Mac computers will abandon Intel processors, and "within two years" all Apple Mac products will use Apple's self-developed chips.
Five months later, Apple officially launched the first computer chip, the M1, and assembled it on top of the newly released MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. It also means that Apple notebooks and desktops abandon Intel processors that have been used for 15 years.
As far as Intel is concerned, the absence of 5G baseband chips not only restricts its development in the 5G era, but also loses Apple, a big customer, even in the field of desktop chips. However, the reason why Apple can completely abandon Intel is not out of retaliation, the fundamental reason is that the two research and development strengths are the trade-off, and the backwardness of Intel's chip manufacturing capabilities.
For example, as Apple's first Mac self-developed chip, M1 adopts TSMC's most advanced 5nm process, internally packages a staggering 16 billion transistors, and integrates 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, neural network engine, DRAM memory and other functions in the same chip, with a maximum CPU increase of 3.5 times, a GPU up to 2 times, and a comprehensive suspension of Intel processors in performance.
At this time, Intel is still stagnant in 14nm process technology, 10nm process due to yield, capacity bottlenecks and other issues such as mass production can not be landed, 7nm process is repeatedly postponed, continue to sit on the "toothpaste factory" nickname.
Following the M1, Apple released the more powerful M1 Pro and M1 Max in 2021, and the performance and power consumption have been exponentially optimized on the basis of the M1. Under the blessing of the M1 series of chips, Apple's Mac product sales have risen steadily, and the revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 exceeded the $10 billion mark for the first time, setting a record high.
Chip self-development has brought a significant boost to Apple's financial data. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the overall gross profit margin of Apple's hardware business reached 38.4%, a new high in 6 years, and the comprehensive gross profit margin reached 43.8%, an increase of 4 percentage points year-on-year, setting a new high in 10 years. In fiscal 2021, Apple's net profit reached a record $94.68 billion, and the credit for chip self-development is great.
In addition to performance improvements, Apple's self-developed chips also have platform integration considerations. Since the M1 chip also uses the ARM architecture, the App on the iPhone and iPad can be synchronized to the Mac for use, and Apple has thus broken through the barriers between the two independent operating systems of iOS and macOS, realized the unification of hardware, software and other levels, and the ecological closed loop has since gone further.
All along, The Apple of the Cook era has always been criticized for lack of innovation and lack of iPhone-style "disruptive products". But in fact, in the past decade, Cook has led Apple to not only achieve continuous evolution on the bottom layer of hardware through chip self-research, but also strengthened its own ecological advantages. This is not only Apple's focus on the development strategy of software and hardware integration, but also the accumulation of its technical strength after the accumulation of time. This should be a good reference for Chinese enterprises that have suffered from "lack of core".
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