Apple gets creative with their upcoming CPUs
It’s not just what you do but how you do it
We all know about the Apple M1 CPU, but what can we expect from next year’s M2 CPU?
SemiAccurate has talked to a bunch of insiders and found out some interesting details about the next fruit-themed laptop part.
The current M1 is a slightly tarted up A14 or about what you would expect it to be. This isn’t to say it is a bad chip, far from it, it is a very good CPU but it doesn’t break any ground.
The next Apple laptop CPU, likely called the M2, and it’s A15 ‘device’ counterpart are said to be the ‘real deal’. When questioned on that comment, SemiAccurate’s sources said that it would significantly outperform Intel’s current high end Skylake parts and do so at a small fraction of the power.
How this would be achieved is the interesting part, especially considering the disparate requirements of a phone and a full laptop. A15/M2 be more oriented toward the laptop side of the equation rather than just slightly tarting up the current phone chip for starters, but won’t deviate much from the current architectural paradigms. It will also be based on a TSMC 5nm variant, basically an updated PDK, and
packaged using InFO.
All of this is pretty well known, some blindingly obvious, some only rumored, but all of it confirmed by our sources.
Where things get interesting is how Apple is using these technologies to step out of the proverbial box and do something SemiAccurate didn’t expect to see for another few years.
