Roll Your Own Chips – When you design products that someone else is going to manufacture using processes that trip against quantum physics effects, no one is cool enough to not be a little worried that something will go wrong.
Let’s Build a Chip – We lay out the costs of building a chip – with spreadsheets!
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi? – Apple can withstand a missed product cycle or two.
Where did Apple’s margins come from? – The M1 probably added only $300m to Apple’s gross margins this quarter, but it probably also helped them sell a lot more MacBooks, the benefit of Apple Silicon is strategic not cost savings.
Over the past 25 years the mobile phone industry has radically altered the way we all live, and yet the industry itself is back to the same structure it had all those years ago.
Intel Selects Option C – All of the Above – Intel is going to invest $20 billion in manufacturing and open up its fabs to outside foundry customers. A bold confident signal, now they just have to execute on it.
Could? Should? Would? – In which we totally make up a scenario in which mobile operating systems get better.
Gamma Ray Exposure Preferred; Not Required – Apple’s job listing hint at their ambitions for cellular modems.
Heterogeneous Compute – The competitive dynamics of the processor markets were static for years, but the demand for “AI” and the emergence of new customers/competitors means the market for all processors is likely to shift considerably in coming years.
It’s a Trap – Intel published a set of benchmarks that purport to show their chips actually outperform Apple’s M1. We use this example as a primer in all the shortcomings of Benchmarks as a Marketing tool. TL;DR – the Apple M1 is probably very good.
