Are most chipmakers falling behind apple? And why

di_lorenzo

Recently I watched thi video that confirmed most of my thoughts on what’s going on with new SoC mainly in the android world

In synthesis until now Apple was the only one that in the last 4 years had a steady good improvement in general power and performance/watt which as the source says is probably the most important parameter on a mibile device

This is due to main factors:

1 ARM cores, of every kind, not only didn’t improve in 5 years but they have even gotten worse in perf/watt ratio, and peak performance require too much power with consecutive heat excess

2 Apple monopolized the TSMC chips factory capability, so Qualcomm tried to rely on Samsung factoring process, which is WAY worse in every way possible and this showed when comparing the 8 gen 1 with the 8+ gen 1, which are almost identical chips but with the second one being manufactured by TSMC

3 Qualcomm monopolized the high-end smartphone market, eve using forcing some manufacturers to use their chips, and that explains why almost no one used the dimensity 9000 wich is better than the snapdragon 8 gen 1

4 Even Apple with the A16 settled down because even the a15 has no real competition so they didn’t need a real big improvement

5 Hisilicon (huawei) stopped producing competitive chips because of the US ban

To know in depth details I’ll leave the link to the video and some self explanatory graphs

Heyo

di_lorenzo Wow this is a great explainer and you clearly know quite a lot about SoCs and computing so I’ll definitely be asking you any of my questions about this lol.

I do think that others are falling behind Apple and I think a lot of that has to do with the TSMC vs. Samsung situation you mentioned, but also because Apple has full control over the hardware and software. They can design them in tandem with each other and I think that’s a big part of it. They can tune their software and hardware however they want.

Even Google with their own Tensor chips couldn’t get it as powerful as Apple or Qualcomm (although they might not have been intentionally trying to build a more powerful chip which is another discussion in itself).

Anyway, that’s my very limited observation lol.

Ari_02

I really appreciate the way You explained that, it’s very clear and You focused very well on the main infos, i’ve been courious abt that for a while so far but i’ve never found explanations ,

Well done.

Matthias

I find it kind of funny how you complain that the arm cores did not make that much improvements for the last 5 years, but also say that apple has not improved much for the A16 because they do not have a competitor.

And another funny thing about this is that the A14, the A15 and the A16 are ARM based SoCs, so the ARM Architecture could not be the cause of the lower performance/efficiency.

The SoCs do not effect the battery life in that much any more if the power efficiency cores are used. So except for gaming and similar tasks wich needs a lot of power when it comes to 3D graphics or a data Connection the most energy is drained by the display. There is a lot of potential to save energy

di_lorenzo

Matthias When I’m complaining about arm cores I’m talking about cortex a510, a710 and x2 with their predecessors, which are the cores Qualcomm mediatek samsung and google use, while Apple uses their own custom design and often different istruction set on their chips, and with 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency are able to obliterate competitors

The complain it’s about the fact that a510 is actually less efficient than a55 and performance about the same, even if there is a 4 years gap, and the same goes for the a710 and a78

Also, SoC power drain is more than what you could think, and you can find in the video I linked the power measurement, where a SoC like the 8 gen 1 can drow 12w at peak which is insanely high for a smartphone to handle.

Also I’ve personally noticed the difference from snapdragon 860 and 870 which where never power efficienct by any means to a snapdragon 888 which can draw up to 10w and even limiting it in 4g when it’s not on WiFi it draws battery way too fast

The display on the other and are what manufacturers are starting to save power on, just look at the most recent top smartphones from the last year and you’ll see that they started adding LTPO to limit power consumption and bumped up battery sizes

Matthias

di_lorenzo I can’t disagree on that

TechnTyre

We are at the point where more efficient architecture of the chipset is not truely possible. Eg beyond 3nm construction you have physical phenomena hindering further development of our texh industry.

It will become a huge bottleneck in the upcoming years

di_lorenzo

TechnTyre I agree, but I’m sure manufacturers will find other solution to crank up performance per watt, such as more and faster cache

di_lorenzo

Heyo Oh thank you,

Anyway I agree on the apple optimization being better because of fewer devices and a close ecosystem, and Google performance wise is technically the worst manufacturer, and even considering the fact that they use kind of old architecture (cortex a76 also clocked low) and that they rely on samsung for manufacturing, they’re new to the game and their new chip (tensor g2) seems no better

Google knows this and they rely more on other parts of the SoC, mainly the AI cores, which they use to implement probably the best and useful features, ranging from photography to translation and speech features

SprintingWorm

I think you are absolutely right. But I think there are still something to add.

Imagine how apple by themselves have a whole ecosystem, so every developer has to follow their rules, and all their devices, software and hardware can receive better optimization on performance and other stuff. They understand how to customize devices’ chip, ram or other stuff with better support to the software, while Qualcomm don’t make customized chipsets for only certain devices.

Even they can customize for their own device, like Samsung and Google, they are still facing the problem from the nature of Android. Android is an open source platform, which means when you develop something, you must consider all devices out their in the market. So it is harder for optimizations, while it is much easier on apple devices.

That’s a very personal opinion after working a few years in the tech industry. It may not be 100% right, but I hope it can help.

di_lorenzo

SprintingWorm I agree with all you said, but I’m still convinced that there’s also an hardware superiority of Apple right now, because if you look also at macOS vs Windows or chromeos, you can emulate both the last two on macOS with an M1 chip and still crush benchmarks with better scores than everything Qualcomm has to offer and even freshly realesed pc chips like the 8cx gen 3.

And now there’s the M2.

I genuinely hope for some improvements, and Qualcomm coming back to tsmc brought a good chip so we have to see this next year

Heyo

di_lorenzo That is a really good point about the Mac chips. They quite literally blow everyone else away in terms of performance and battery life, like it’s not even close lol.

I don’t have an M-based Mac yet but I’m hoping to get one soon mainly for the performance and endurance gains. The most incredible part of it is that they were able to get massive performance and endurance gains at the same time. Normally you can get one or the other but not both lol

SprintingWorm

Heyo Trust me, M1 Mac air is the best laptop I have ever used. It’s light and super good

Heyo

SprintingWorm Ugh. Now I want one even more lol!

SprintingWorm

Heyo it suits me so well, I do copywriting and video & photo post-. It is both good for caring around anywhere so I can type anywhere and good at fast editing for my projects on DaVinci Resolve with no lags or anything. The battery is also good.

Not to say I love Keynote so much compare to powerpoint, I even use it to make animation 🤣

It also has airdrop and iCloud, so I can good synergy with my colleagues and save local storage.

Heyo

SprintingWorm Oh yeah all my friends who have one just rave about it lol. Maybe we could do some for the Tryout Program lol??