Dick James is an almost 50-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, working in the process development, design, manufacturing, packaging and reverse engineering of semiconductor devices. Dick is a regular contributor to TechStream blog content for subscribers.
December 21, 2020
It followed the A-series design philosophy, with a combination of large high-performance cores and smaller high-efficiency cores, in this case four of each, compared with the A14’s two+four. The GPU has eight cores (vs. four), and the neural engine seems to be the same 16-core block as in the A14. The secure enclave appears to be a SoC implementation of the T2 security chip used in earlier MacBooks.
It is Apple’s second 5-nm part, almost certainly made on the same process as the A14, with 16 billion transistors, compared with the 11.5 Bn in the A14 from the latest iPhone. We obtained a Macbook Air (13-inch, 256 GB) and removed the M1, and our speculation that the package was like the A12X was correct.
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