What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. The above diagram is an estimated feature layout of Apple’s latest big core design – what’s represented here is my best effort attempt in identifying the new designs’ capabilities, but certainly is not an exhaustive drill-down into everything that Apple’s design has to offer – so naturally some inaccuracies might be present. The new Firestorm core and its years long pedigree from continued generational improvements lies at the heart of today’s discussion, and is the key part as to how Apple is making the large jump away from Intel x86 designs to their own in-house SoCs. The following disclosures are estimated based on testing the behavior of the latest Apple A14 SoC inside of the iPhone 12 Pro: Apple's Firestorm CPU Core: Even Bigger & WiderĪpple’s latest generation big core CPU design inside of the A14 is codenamed “Firestorm”, following up last year’s “Lightning” microarchitecture inside of the Apple A13. Through our own in-house tests as well as third party microbenchmarks (A special credit due for microarchitecturometer test suite), we can however unveil some of the details of Apple’s designs. While we don’t have the official means and information as to how Apple’s CPU work, that doesn’t mean we cannot figure out certain aspects of the design. Over the years, Apple’s design cadence seems to have settled down around major bi-generation microarchitecture updates starting with the A7 chipset, with the A9, A11, A13 all showcasing major increases of their design complexity and microarchitectural width and depth.Īpple’s CPUs still pretty much remain a black box design given that the company doesn’t disclose any details, and the only publicly available resources on the matter date back to LLVM patches in the A7 Cyclone era, which very much aren’t relevant anymore to today’s designs. This year’s A14 chip includes the 8 th generation in Apple’s 64-bit microarchitecture family that had been started off with the A7 and the Cyclone design. The Apple iPhone 11, 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max Review
#Video card for mac pro a11 86 plus
The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review Over subsequent generations, Apple had evolved their custom CPU microarchitecture at an astounding rate, posting massive performance gains with each generation, which we’ve covered extensively over the years: AnandTech A-Series Coverage and Testing Apple’s early adoption of the 64-bit Armv8 ISA shocked everybody, as the company was the first in the industry to implement the new instruction set architecture, but they beat even Arm’s own CPU teams by more than a year, as the Cortex-A57 (Arm own 64-bit microarchitecture design) would not see light of day until late 2014.Īpple famously called their “Cyclone” design a “desktop-class architecture” which in hindsight probably should have an obvious pointer to where the company was heading. The real shocker that really made waves through the industry was however Apple’s subsequent release of the Cyclone CPU microarchitecture in 2013’s Apple A7 SoC and iPhone 5S. Even back then with their first-generation “Swift” design, the company had marked some impressive performance figures compared to the mobile competition. Apple’s long journey into custom CPU microarchitectures started off with the release of the Apple A6 back in 2012 in the iPhone 5.
The secret sauce lies in Apple’s in-house CPU microarchitecture. So how does Apple plan to compete with AMD and Intel in this market? Readers who have been following Apple’s silicon endeavors over the last few years will certainly not be surprised to see the performance that Apple proclaimed during the event.
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