The history of Apple processors Ah: how Apple became the leader in the mobile chip market. Due to the virus, TSMC has suspended production. This company makes A12 processors for Apple

On the night of August 4-5, TSMC started having problems with virus attack. Because of this, production has stopped, and the chipmaker's expected profit for the 3rd quarter of 2018 may decrease. We tell you what happened there and what this attack could affect.

What kind of TSMC?

TSMC is the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer. This company supplies its chips to AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel. Apple is also among TSMC's clients: it was a contract manufacturer of A11 processors, and is now making A12 for future iPhone models.

What happened there?

TSMC was attacked by a virus when installing a new software for new equipment. After this, a virus penetrated the company’s internal network and instantly infected computers at several factories. Because of this, production stopped for 2 days.

Who is to blame is unknown. But this is reminiscent of the outbreak, when many corporations around the world were forced to suspend their activities. Fortunately, this virus was then released, and Microsoft released an update to protect all its users.

One of the TSMC factories. When it stopped, the company lost a lot of money

TSMC Chief Financial Officer Laura Ho told Bloomberg that such attacks have happened before, but they never affected production. She decided to remain silent about the details of the consequences:

TSMC has been attacked by viruses before, but this is the first time such an attack has affected our production.

Laura Ho

What impact did this have?

Stopping production large company with cool customers - a disaster. Because of this, TSMC’s revenue in July–September may decrease by 3% - $253 million. Before the virus, the company planned to earn 8.45 billion during this period. However, TSMC is not going to give up and plans to catch up in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The consequences for Apple are still unknown. Let us recall that recently its capitalization exceeded a trillion dollars, mainly due to sales of the iPhone X. Perhaps this year at the start of sales the shortage of new iPhones will be even steeper, but this is far from a fact - TSMC is prepared for such attacks, and the consequences will not be very great. However, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Mark Lee said that this will affect all of the chipmaker’s clients.

Has the problem been resolved yet?

Yes, the problem was solved. 80% of the infected factories started working again on August 5, and 6 all production started working again on full force. This problem took so long to solve because the degree of contamination in the factories varied.

The main thing is that TSMC did not lose any data about its research. Besides, weakness The systems have already been fixed, and such errors should not be repeated.

Apple wants to accelerate the development of its own semiconductors to further overtake its competitors. The company plans to make ARM processors for Mac laptops, its own modems for the iPhone, and much more.

On Friday, the Japanese publication Nikkei published information received from analysts that Apple plans to expand its semiconductor production. More specifically, Tim Cook and the company's management are interested in "the production of nuclear processors for laptops, chip modems for phones and processors responsible for touch displays and fingerprint scanners."

Apple has already hired engineers from Taiwan's Novatek, a leader in processor production, as well as panel maker AU Optronics.

So far, the company is purchasing modem chips from Intel and Qualcomm, but analyst Mark Lee believes that “Apple is investing in the research and development of modem chips responsible for mobile communications.”

Excerpt from the article:

The chip industry veteran believes that to work on such large-scale project more than a thousand engineers will be needed.

Earlier this year, Qualcomm Vice President Esin Terzioglu led Apple's chip project. We wouldn't be surprised if Apple develops its own modem chip, given that Samsung also uses its Exynos modem.

Sources also said Apple is trying to become less dependent on Intel for laptop processors and start making its own based on ARM.

Of course, Apple for years develops its own processors.

The company has created processors for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, chip for wireless AirPods and scanner. They are mass produced at third party facilities of Samsung and TSMC. According to sources, the company does not plan to limit the production of its products to the territory of its own factories.

Research firm IC Insights ranked Apple fourth in the world for producing its own processors. The company was ahead of only Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek.

Here's what analyst Shirley Tsai thinks: "It doesn't matter whether you're Apple or Google, in the era artificial intelligence you will have to develop your own algorithms and technologies, create applications and build ecosystems with the maximum a large number partners."

Apple has shown what can be achieved by creating advanced processors and operating systems. This is once again proven by the A11 Bionic processor in the new iPhone models.

The A-series processors allowed Apple to overtake its competitors. Android devices demand more random access memory and cores to match iOS work, and in the era of artificial intelligence this will become even more important.

Apple is already moving in this direction: the neural engine in the A11 Bionic processor is the first dual-core CPU, optimized for machine learning algorithms.

The fact that Apple will develop its processors for laptops is obvious, but when will this happen? It’s impossible to say for sure yet. But the A11 Bionic processor proved with test results that Apple is capable of creating a powerful processor for a laptop.

An ARM-based processor would enable even thinner laptops with more powerful batteries. At the time of writing, Apple offers 200 positions related to the production of processors.

After Apple used the first iPad processor A4 of its own manufacture, rumors began to spread that in the future the company might abandon Intel processors in Macs and switch to ARM architecture. There are benefits to this, but there are a lot of implications that this migration will have that Apple will need to overcome. Is the game worth the candle?

Why modern Macs run on Intel processors

Since 2006, all new Apple computers run on x86 processors in conjunction with a GPU from Nvidia or AMD (or built-in graphics core Intel in entry-level models). Thanks to Open GL, Mac software can interact with GPUs different architecture, allowing Apple to easily change graphics providers.

After switching to Intel processors, Apple released two more major releases of OS X, which included support for the old (PowerPC) and new (x86) architecture, but Snow Leopard, released in 2009, only worked on Macs with Intel processors.

How is switching to ARM different from switching to Intel with PowerPC?

In the period from 1994 to 2005, all software for Mac OS was “tailored” exclusively to work on PowerPC processors, the architecture of which was radically different from x86. Even earlier, for the previous ten years, Macs were running Motorola processors called 68k (68000, 68020, 60030 and 68040).

The first change in architecture was caused by the desire to move to more modern and productive processors with support for 64-bit computing. With PowerPC's performance far superior to 68k, it could easily emulate existing code.

Apple's second transition, from PowerPC to Intel, didn't look like such a big step forward. Manufacturers of PowerPC chips (IBM and Motorola/Freescale) have actually left the PC market, “playing cameo roles” in the niches of the automotive industry and game consoles. Apple was their last client, but the company sold less than 4 million of its computers a year.

But the Windows PC market was in full swing, all computers used Intel x86 architecture or compatible analogues from AMD. By switching from PowerPC to Intel, Apple abandoned a sinking ship and chose an emerging ecosystem where innovation and technology developed very quickly due to high volumes of production.

However, the available x86 architecture was essentially a step backwards. After all, at that time all Intel processors were 32-bit, while the PowerPC, which Apple used in its PowerMac G5 since 2003, supported 64-bit computing. Only in 2006, when Intel introduced Core line 2, Apple returned to 64-bit processors in its computers.

There were other shortcomings in the transition to Intel architecture, but they were covered by the high pace of development due to the large market. At that time, Intel processors were slightly more powerful than PowerPC, but their performance was sufficient to emulate most code written for PowerPC. This was made possible thanks to Rosetta technology, which Apple bought and improved to smooth out the difficulties of moving to a new platform.

In addition, the change in architecture to x86 meant the opportunity Windows startup(Linux and other x86 OS). This significantly expanded the potential audience, attracting buying a Mac users who needed to run specific Windows applications. Boot Camp allowed to install Windows second system on disk, and third-party applications made it possible to launch Windows programs directly into the OS X environment. Both methods were significantly faster than simply emulating Windows code on PowerPC, which was the only option available to Mac users before the transition to Intel processors.

Why Apple might be interested in moving away from Intel processors

Saving money

The main reason why Apple might consider making Macs without Intel processors is because high price the latter. Intel's chips are too high-tech and difficult enough to copy, which is why they are uncompetitive and allow Intel to charge such a high price for them.

It's difficult to determine the exact price Apple pays for Intel processors. Analysts from IHS iSuppli believe that the Intel Core i5 used by Microsoft Surface Pro, 4-5 times more expensive than ARM chips in Surface RT. A6 processors for iPad, in their opinion, cost Apple $25 apiece, while Intel chips, used in Macs, cost $180–300. Ideas that Apple could replace Intel's $200 chips with one or two $25 chips have sparked rumors about the possibility of a switch Apple computers to ARM architecture.

However, such a comparison is not entirely correct, because modern ARM processors are significantly inferior in performance to even entry-level Intel Core i5 chips. There is a huge gap between the processing power of Intel processors and the fastest ARM processors - this was proven by Microsoft's experiment in porting Windows to the Surface RT ARM chip.

Apple can create more powerful ARM processors

Apple has been aggressively increasing the processing power of its Ax series processors, thanks to funding from production savings. The company sells about 70 million iPads and nearly 170 million iPhones each year.

In that Apple year could have created even more powerful A8 chips if not for the limitations imposed by the thickness of the case, limited battery size and the problem of heat dissipation in iOS devices. The company made it clear that when designing the A8, the top priority was energy efficiency, which is so important for iPad Air 2 (which has a smaller battery than its predecessor) in order to keep the autonomy of the device at the same level.

Mac mini and even MacBook Air much less constrained by power consumption and heat dissipation limitations, which would allow Apple to increase processor operating frequencies, the number of cores, or add other hardware to them, providing them with larger amounts of memory and cache.

Considering all these circumstances, Apple may even be interested in creating some new specific Mac running on an ARM processor, which in terms of performance will not be so far from budget ones desktop processors. After all, ARM is now already ahead of Intel x86 mobile chips.

Before switching to Intel processors, Apple produced about 4 million Macs a year. On this moment Annual Mac production volumes are almost 20 million, and the company sold about the same number of iPads in the first four quarters. Apple initially considered using chips in the iPad Intel Atom, but abandoned this idea in favor of ARM.

Creating our own silicon IC technology

Based on the fact that Apple uses optimization of chips used in iOS devices, we can assume that the company is also interested in optimizing processors for Mac. It can remove unused logic and introduce additional ones to implement encryption, audio processing, or video decoding in hardware.

Using a single architecture across Macs and iOS devices can greatly simplify the use of hardware and software, as well as transferring APIs and other software between systems.

Moreover, when developing proprietary technologies used only in Ax processors, all Apple investments will remain within the company and bring profit exclusively to it. Now, by buying processors from Intel, Apple indirectly makes a contribution to the development of the entire PC industry. Intel is creating new generations of processors that are available to everyone, and their development costs are reduced by the production volumes provided by Apple.

Considering the not the most impressive Intel's successes In motivating PC manufacturers to create ultrabooks, Mac mini clones and Android Atom tablets, the loss of a client like Apple would have catastrophic consequences not only for Intel, but for everyone who uses x86 processors.

What's holding Apple back from switching to ARM

Apple made a move towards Intel for reasonable reasons. In 2006, it did not have a serious team for developing chips, nor did it have sufficient capital to develop its own technology for creating them. Intel has already done this work and purchase ready-made solution not only made sense, but was also the best of the few options available to Apple at the time.

Despite the fact that Apple is now one of the leading manufacturers mobile processors and has $150 billion in capital to support its most ambitious projects, using Intel chips still makes sense for a number of reasons.

Existing Intel Technologies and Capabilities

Today, Intel owns the world's leading processor technology and has incredible manufacturing capabilities to match Apple requests. By remaining an Intel customer, Apple not only gets them, but also the chipmaker's future designs, which it will invest in to remain the most advanced processor manufacturer in the world.

Large orders give Apple priority in chip selection, as well as discounts due to high volumes. The profit the company receives from each Mac sold is simply unattainable for PC manufacturers, even taking into account the considerable cost of Intel processors.

For Apple, there are no half measures that other manufacturers can take; it chooses only the most advanced technologies. The company buys best LCD panels, uses a licensed Helvetica font. While Microsoft and Google use low-quality displays, copies of Helvetica, and also do not use fingerprint scanners in their products due to their high cost.

Loss of AMD as a supplier

By leaving Intel, Apple may lose a potential supplier of x86 compatible video chips from AMD.

The company now purchases GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia, choosing the best from available solutions depending on new technologies and price. Thanks to OpenGL, changing video chip vendors is easy.

Apple did not play into AMD's hands in their confrontation with Intel, but theoretically it could - if Intel makes a mistake and AMD manages to create a more affordable and superior processor capable of running x86 code on Macs. Apple's move away from Intel to ARM processors will eliminate even this theoretical possibility of replacing Intel chips with cheaper AMD ones.

Dubious savings when partially switching to ARM

Apple now will not be able to replace Intel processors with ARM in the entire line of Macs, especially in the top families and modifications MacBook Pro And Mac Pro, and this is precisely the segment from which the company receives most of its profits and, thanks to minimal competition, retains the loyalty of the community.

If Apple releases just one new model Mac running on ARM architecture, this will reduce its dependence on Intel, but will also increase the cost of purchasing processors for x86 Macs due to reduced volumes. Thus, a partial transition to ARM will not give Apple anything in terms of savings.

The mere fact of creating an ARM Mac does not guarantee its popularity. Microsoft has already made an attempt to port Windows to ARM, but new audience it didn't work. Two years were wasted, except for the deterioration of relations with Intel. The processor giant responded with an announcement Android support and Meego/Tizen, spending billions of dollars subsidized by tablet manufacturers to introduce Atom, which was aimed at the same goal as Microsoft with its Surface RT - significant market expansion.

Of course, Microsoft was not going to save money and the main reason for using ARM was the desire to increase energy efficiency compared to desktop and mobile alternatives from Intel. But these wonderful beginnings were cut down in the bud harsh reality- existing Windows applications could not run on ARM architecture.

Apple has extensive experience in porting software to new architectures. The company has proven that it can simultaneously support multiple hardware platforms, but despite this, it has always tried to complete such transitions quickly to bring everything to unified standard and avoid the problem of hardware fragmentation.

Big risks

To top it off financially, developing ARM chips for the Mac could cause additional problems, for example, complications and slowdowns in the development of mobile processors used in iPhones, iPads and other new products.

Apple's mobile device sales make up the majority of its profits. Last year the company sold 244 million iOS devices and only 18.9 million Macs. The transition to ARM architecture will inevitably cause a change in priorities for the development of the mobile segment and, theoretically, could allow competitors to become leaders. It is unlikely that Apple has hundreds of free engineers sitting idle to disperse the efforts of the ARM chip development team into two different directions.

Moving away from a key supplier could also confuse Apple existing clients and risks casting a shadow on his name. When Microsoft introduced the Surface RT, it lost customer trust because the "no-compromise Windows PC" couldn't actually run Windows applications and had limitations related to the performance of ARM processors. Potential buyers of ARM Macs will have even greater demands and expectations from the new Apple product.

Incompatibility with x86 architecture

Apple has extensive experience in porting its own operating systems, frameworks, applications and development tools to new architectures. The company transferred Mac OS from 68k to PowerPC, ported NeXT software from Intel to PowerPC, and iOS, in fact, is OS X adapted to the mobile realities.

Apple certainly knows how to build an ARM version of OS X and, if necessary, can provide tools for developers to help them rebuild their applications for Macs on ARM architecture, but this will require a lot of work and significant effort from the developers themselves. The costs and expenses associated with creating application ports may not meet expectations, especially if Apple sells less than 20 million Macs per year.

Apple TV experience

Like Surface RT, Apple TV can be seen as a recent example of a shift in architecture. Original Apple version The TV, sold from 2007 to 2009, was essentially a stripped-down Mac with an Intel x86 processor and Nvidia graphics, running a modified version of OS X.

In 2010, Apple introduced the second generation of TV set-top boxes running under iOS control on its own A4 processor, which had built-in graphics. This transition, which entailed a complete redesign of the hardware architecture, reduced the price of the product from $299 to $99.

But Apple TV is a very specific example - the set-top box is produced in relatively small volumes and does not bring much profit to the company, moreover, it does not have third party applications, and therefore problems with their adaptation. Its transition to iOS and ARM was a fairly simple task. At $300, the Apple TV simply didn't have a chance in the market, but when it dropped to $99, the set-top box began to sell very well, bringing in nearly a billion dollars a year for Apple (including media content that boosts its sales). In 2010, Apple had a source of rejected A4 (and then A5) chips that were not suitable for the iPad, so Apple TV became an ideal candidate for the transition to ARM architecture.

Don't expect an ARM-MacBook in the near future

The question of traditional Macs switching to ARM architecture is not whether Apple can replace Intel, but rather whether it will be commercially viable.

If Apple really decides to introduce an ultra-low-cost MacBook Air in “netbook format”, then it will be easier for it to refuse expensive Core i5 chips and create an inexpensive product that runs on iOS or a stripped-down version of OS X. Such a MacBook would take its place next to the Surface RT and Chromebooks from HP and Samsung running on Samsung ARM chips.

However, at the moment there is too little convincing evidence that would prove that Apple is interested in selling laptops with low performance. Now on sale record number Makov in price category$900-$3000, and there is also an iPad that covers the more budget range of $200-$800.

Despite the fact that iPad sales decreased by 4% at the end of last year, it cannot be said that the tablet form factor is losing popularity and needs to be replaced. In fact, it looks like Apple has turned iPad users into potential Mac buyers, which is a lot more success (and profit) than motivation Mac users to buying an iPad.

Yet the technology industry is constantly in flux, and routines are often disrupted by new products that cost and do less than existing ones. Proof of this can be seen in the iPhone, which was capable of significantly less than the existing smartphones at that time, as well as the iPad and Apple TV, which lacked the functions that were in the TV set-top boxes that preceded them. Apple simply cut off the “necessary” features and thereby created new, accessible and attractive product categories.

By building a Mac based on an ARM processor, Apple could greatly discredit its own premium computer business. Theoretically, a company could create inexpensive MacBook, say, for the education sector, but this is too small a market, which is now saturated with Google Chromebooks.

In a year or two, circumstances may change. It's possible that Apple will reach a point where premium business mac it will be difficult to expand further. During this time, the company can develop technology that would allow it to create an ARM processor that closely approaches Intel's performance, but at a lower price. Apple could create hardware support for emulating x86 applications, thereby minimizing costs and speeding up the transition to ARM.

While Intel doesn't have any major breakthroughs in x86 processor development, it may make more sense for Apple to invest in the design and development of its own modern ARM chips (or even a completely new architecture) for desktop computers and laptops.

In general, it seems that the market for traditional computers and laptops has stopped developing. Apple is expanding its share of premium computers, and it has every chance to continue this trend without making radical changes to the Mac. The company could use its vast but limited resources to make a better investment than replacing Intel as the processor supplier for several million Macs. At least for the next few years.

Introduced three new iPhones, which use many functions machine learning. This would be impossible without a processor specially designed for this. Unlike other gadget manufacturers, Apple designs its own chips. Wired told how the company does this and how much money it spends on it.

A few years ago, engineers thought that iPhone camera can become smarter with the help of powerful new machine learning algorithms known as neural networks. They immediately shared their idea with Vice President Tim Millett.

Millett leads a team of processor engineers. In iPhone X they added new portrait mode, which can adjust the lighting on people's faces and skillfully blur the background. All this is thanks to a new module added to the main processor of the iPhone - a neural engine tailored for machine learning. Thanks to him, the Face ID blocking system appeared.

The fact that iPhone engineers were able to design the processor themselves to run features like Face ID shows the benefits of Apple's unconventional hardware strategy. Most computer and gadget manufacturers buy chips for their devices from semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel, Qualcomm or Samsung. Since 2010, Apple has been designing its own processor, which is custom-made by a third-party company.

Last week Apple presented three new iPhones. All devices run on a new processor called A12 Bionic, designed by Millet's team. To create it, more advanced technologies were used than to create any other equivalent chip in a mobile device. The size of individual elements of A12 transistors is 7 nanometers, which is 3 nanometers less than in previous iPhone. So Apple was able to fit 6.9 billion transistors - 2.6 billion more than last year.

Thereby GPU much more powerful, and the neural engine is larger. Last year it could perform 600 billion operations per second, today it can perform five trillion.

Millett says these updates have improved portrait mode, which allows users to adjust the depth of field after the photo has been taken. In addition, augmented reality has become even more accurate and realistic. The neural engine is also now available for third party developers, with the goal of creating even more AI-powered applications.

Simultaneous work on software and hardware is especially valuable now for Apple, when iPhone sales stopped growing. The company must come up with new features to stimulate iPhone owners update your devices. Samsung also makes smartphones and their processors, but the two industries are not intertwined like they are at Apple, and the Korean company sells its processors to other device makers.

Apple won't admit who makes the new A12 chips. There is talk in the industry that the Taiwanese company TSMC is doing this. At a TSMC event last October, Apple's chief operating officer was quoted as saying that TSMC is the sole supplier of new iPhone and iPad chips and praising it for producing 1.5 billion Apple chips in less than a year.

If this is true, then Apple had to spend a lot of money. "They're spending a lot of money to reserve manufacturing resources and be first in line," said Patrick Moorhead, semiconductor analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. Apple says its capital expenditures will total $17 billion by the end of its fiscal year. That's eight times more than the company spent in 2010, when Jobs unveiled the first designed Apple chip in iPhone 4.

Apple is the most dear company in the world, but chip designers will soon be faced with an even greater force: the laws of physics. The industry is confident that 5 nanometer transistors will appear in 2020. It is not yet clear how to reduce them further. The long-term trend of exponential shrinkage of transistors, called Moore's Law, has slowed and may have stopped.

Apple's strategy may continue to work if or when the transistors stop shrinking. Processor design may become the primary way to get the most out of silicon chips, and full control Apple over iPhone will give more flexibility.

Millett refuses to answer questions about the team's plans, although he notes that the developers are now thinking even bigger. “It takes us several years to develop a processor from start to finish,” he says. Somewhere in the depths of Apple's headquarters in California, hardware is already being developed that will bring new features to the next iPhones.