What sort of Silicon will Apple's New Volksphone (iPhone SE successor) be using?

[amd6502]

Apple is set to launch a new ambitious mobile phone for the masses (next month). Clearly they cannot do this with the M1 silicon, which has an enormous GPU and far too many transistors to be affordable in that target market.

Will they be doing in house Silicon again, or using a third party SoC from Mediatek, Qualcom, or other?

If they do their own custom silicon again (this is probably what mos expect), what sort of configuration relative to the M1 do you expect?

 

[Commodus]

Apple is set to launch a new ambitious mobile phone for the masses (next month). Clearly they cannot do this with the M1 silicon, which has an enormous GPU and far too many transistors to be affordable in that target market.

Will they be doing in house Silicon again, or using a third party SoC from Mediatek, Qualcom, or other?

If they do their own custom silicon again (this is probably what mos expect), what sort of configuration relative to the M1 do you expect?

It'll be an A15 like in the iPhone 13. Bet on it. Apple hasn't used third-party silicon in an iPhone since the iPhone 3GS from 2009.

 

[amd6502]

The Apple A15 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit six-core CPU implementing ARMv8 with two high-performance cores called Avalanche and four energy-efficient cores

Wow, but that is still a hefty piece of hardware though. I had to look it up on wiki (link above) and it's 5nm silicon with 15B transistors. I would have thought for a value phone that 5B transistors wouldbe about right or even an upper limit. (Then again Apple's value is more like mid mainstream in the general market, but even for that, I'd think 5B would be a good number.)

 

[Commodus]

Wow, but that is still a hefty piece of hardware though. I had to look it up on wiki (link above) and it's 5nm silicon with 15B transistors. I would have thought for a value phone that 5B transistors wouldbe about right or even an upper limit. (Then again Apple's value is more like mid mainstream in the general market, but even for that, I'd think 5B would be a good number.)

Apple has an advantage in designing its own chips: the cost of those parts doesn't matter as much as it does for companies who have to buy from third parties like Qualcomm or MediaTek. Its business is selling phones, not selling chips, so it doesn't have to worry about price markups for the SoCs it uses.

Remember, Apple has a history of doing this. The original iPhone SE used the same A9 chip from the iPhone 6s released months earlier; the 2020 SE used an A13 to match the iPhone 11 from late 2019.

 

[amd6502]

It might be the case that this neural engine takes up much of the transistor count. Who knows what their software plans for this are in the next few years. Maybe people's telephone will be powering their 'Roomba'-like devices, except that these little helpers will be a lot smarter and more useful. If Apple gets subscription income from maid service that's good for shareholders. It would be good for people with messy apartments too.

 

[Commodus]

It might be the case that this neural engine takes up much of the transistor count. Who knows what their software plans for this are in the next few years. Maybe people's telephone will be powering their 'Roomba'-like devices, except that these little helpers will be a lot smarter and more useful. If Apple gets subscription income from maid service that's good for shareholders. It would be good for people with messy apartments too.

Don't read too much into it at present. The Neural Engine is mainly useful for lightening the load of AI tasks like analyzing video and reducing the hit on battery life; so long as it's just one part of a larger chip, dreams of powering a robovac with your phone will have to wait.

 

[amd6502]

Don't read too much into it at present. The Neural Engine is mainly useful for lightening the load of AI tasks like analyzing video and reducing the hit on battery life; so long as it's just one part of a larger chip, dreams of powering a robovac with your phone will have to wait.

Well, I really hope AMD or Elon will step up to that task. Somebody really needs to; my apartment is getting out of control.