Apple Executives Discuss The Design Method of the A14 Chip

Since the launch of the new iPad Air tablet with A14 chip last month, Apple executives have introduced some of the development details behind it in a series of interviews. For example, before the iPhone 12 conference, Apple’s vice president of platform architecture Tim Millet, and Mac and iPad product marketing senior director Tom Boger, during a new round of interviews with foreign media, talked about the energy efficiency of the custom chip. 

(Picture via MacRumors )

It is reported that Apple may announce four new iPhone 12 family products at the press conference at 1:00 am Beijing time , featuring the same A14 chip as the iPad Air 4. It is manufactured based on the latest 5nm process, which can package more transistors in the same area and run at lower power. In addition, the new technology allows the A14 to accommodate more components besides the CPU/GPU, such as doubling the size of the neural engine (to 16 cores), and can perform 11 trillion operations per second, which is almost the same as the previous generation A13 chip. double. Tim Millet said that we foresee some things that traditional CPU instruction sets cannot do. In theory, we can use GPU to complete many neural network operations, but on mobile devices, the body size and heat generation are limited. On a broader level, he and TomBoger also talked about how Apple's chip architecture team plans the entire company's product portfolio. And how these chips are used in multiple products over time.

Tom Millet pointed out that when they started researching chipsets, they were not limited to building specifically for a certain product, but taking into account a broader lineup. During this time, they will work closely with the product and software teams. Although this does not mean that you will use the six-core A14 chip on wearable devices such as Apple Watch, the architecture developed by the company for flagship smartphones is likely to be reused elsewhere after a certain transformation. For example, as Apple announced that Mac will take two years to actively transfer to self-developed ARM chips, the company has provided developers with Mac mini development based on A-series chips before the release of the first new Apple Silicon product in 2020. Kit. Finally, during another interview on October 5th, Tom Millet also talked about new developments in machine learning, such as close cooperation with the Apple software team and the importance of the Core ML machine learning framework.