Apple reveals the labs that produced the Apple Silicon line of custom CPUs

CNBC Business News has shared the first video footage from inside Apple’s Silicon Valley HQ chip lab. The news organization’s Katie Tarasov visited the labs and talked with several senior Apple execs involved in hardware. She heard about the reasons behind the transition to bringing processor development in-house, the biggest achievements over the years, and the size and scale of the current operation.

The video tour starts in what is described as “a non-descript room filled with a couple hundred buzzing machines.” Here techies in lab coats are seen studiously pondering over components and PCBs, which we assume were taken from some of the 100s of buzzing machines mounted in racks.

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Apple only started working on its processors in around 2008. At that time there were only 40 or 50 engineers, according to the CNBC report. However, that quickly ballooned with the first Apple-branded processor, the 2010 era A4, as used in the iPhone 4, and original iPad. The team got bigger through greater ambitions and acquisitions and in 2023 there are “thousands of engineers working across labs all over the world,” including those in the U.S. Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K., and Japan.

John Ternus, a 22-year Apple veteran and the firm’s SVP of Hardware Engineering, said that the development and implementation of Apple Silicon is “one of the most, if not the most, profound changes at Apple,” in the last 20 years.

To say Apple’s SVP of Hardware Engineering was happy with the progress of Apple’s silicon design team seems like an understatement. “It was almost like the laws of physics had changed,” Ternus said about the advances offered by Apple Silicon. “All of a sudden we could build a MacBook Air that’s incredibly thin and light, has no fan, 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping.” He also asserted that “pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A [games] titles.”

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CNBC’s Tarasov also talked to the head of Apple Silicon, Johny Srouji. He highlighted that Apple Silicon is made only for Apple products, and thus the firm can “exactly and precisely build chips that are going to be targeted for those products, and only for those products.” The process offers great optimization and scalability choices.

It was interesting to hear from the head of Apple Silicon that the biggest changes in recent times have been in strengthening the GPU portion of the SoC. Srouji highlighted the addition of PC-like features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading acceleration.

Of course, as well as the CPU and GPU, Apple has been developing its NPU for on-device AI acceleration. However, CNBC couldn’t draw info from any Apple execs about the rumored Apple GPT. When asked about the possibility of falling behind in AI, Srouji reportedly said, “I don’t believe we are.”

We still don’t expect any Apple SoC to include a modem soon. “We care about cellular, and we have teams enabling that,” said Srouji. Apple also wants to do its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and is reportedly working on them, too.

One of the last segments in the wide-ranging video was a chat about Apple’s reliance on TSMC. This is indeed seen as a risk factor, for various well-known reasons. It is thus hoped Samsung and Intel will become practical alternatives to TSMC for Apple, in the not-too-distant future.