Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, Sept. 17 (Xinhua)-- Dylan Patel, an analyst at semiconductor industry analyst SemiAnalysis, said that Apple is shifting its embedded chip core instruction set from ARM architecture to RISC-V architecture, and Google will also apply some of the designs from the SiFive X280 core to TPU.

For example, the existing Apple A15 bionic chip has more than a dozen Arm-based CPU cores distributed on the chip, which are used for a variety of functions that are not directly user-oriented. SemiAnalysis can confirm that these cores will actively shift to RISC-V architecture in future generations of hardware.

Others pointed out that RISC-V as an open source hardware architecture in BSD, according to Apple's usual style, they will not directly use RISC-V, but will be modified closed source (perhaps named Apple ISA) with their own closed source system for overall marketing, similar to the instruction set mode in CPU after A10.

In Apple Silicon design, the core is a very important part. For example, in M1, there are more than 30 cores responsible for various workloads that have nothing to do with the system, such as WiFi / Bluetooth, interface retiming, touchpad control, NAND chip core and so on. They all have their own firmware and provide support for SoC peripheral function circuits.

For now, most of these cores are based on the Arm M-series or low-end A-Series IP, and Apple is looking for ways to replace them with RISC-V.

Given that a large part of the software relies on the primary big.LITTLE to run, it takes only a few firmware adjustments for other minor SoC tasks to migrate to heterogeneous ISA. More importantly, Apple can save huge licensing fees, and there is no reason for Apple to quit in Cook's way of thinking.

CTOnews.com learned that Apple recently released a series of new iPhone 14 phones, including iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max,5999.

In terms of pre-sale, most people may prefer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max (with A16 chip), and shipment has been delayed to October, while iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus (with A15 chip) can still be purchased on the first day.

According to Apple's official introduction, the A16 bionic chip, a 6-core CPU consisting of two high-performance cores and four energy-efficient cores, increases the speed to up to 40% (compared with the A13). Using the accelerated 5-core image processor, the memory bandwidth is increased by as much as 50%, making it ideal for running graphics-intensive games and App, while the new 16-core neural network engine has a processing capacity of up to 17 trillion operations per second. This chip provides higher performance with extremely low power consumption and provides round-the-clock battery life.

However, the GPU and nerve engine core of the A16 Bionic are exactly the same as last year's A15 Bionic, thanks to the improvement of TSMC's N4 (third-generation 5nm, about 6% density increase) process, resulting in the realization of "nearly 16 billion transistors" in CPU, slightly higher than the A15 in 15 billion, and there should be an increase in power consumption.

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