EP 192: Talking Apple Silicon with Apple's Tom Boger, Kaiann Drance, and Sri Santhanam

Ben Bajarin (0:05)

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Circuit. I am Ben Bajarin. My co-host, Jay Goldberg, is in the wind taking a well-needed vacation in all over Italy.

But I am joined by some very special guests here at Apple Park on the back of a whole slew of very interesting announcements. So I'm going to let my guests introduce themselves and we'll go right into it. So Tom, let's start with you.

Tom Boger (0:32)

Tom Boger, I lead product marketing for the Mac and the iPad.

Kaiann Drance (0:36)

I'm Kaiann Drance, Product Marketing for iPhone and Watch.

Sri Santhanam (0:40)

I'm Sri Santhanam, I head up the Silicon Engineering Group.

Ben Bajarin (0:43)

So this will be fun. I've spent time with most of you individually, but not necessarily as a collective whole. There's all sorts of goodness that came out of this. There's technical goodness, silicon architecturally, there's a whole slew of very interesting product announcements. So I kind of want to get into the interweaving of all of those, right? And I think a good way to kind of frame this both for our audience who enjoys some technical nuggets, but also the practical is to weave in anything that's been done architecturally, to silicon choices, to the end goal, right? Because technology is great, we can do all of these things, we can move to new process technology, but it needs to have an end user benefit. So I want to weave those into the products as well, because I think as we've sort of largely explained on this podcast, Apple's vertical integration is one of those differentiators, and you see hardware, software, and silicon coming together for these product goals with product vision. And so I think having that kind of overall perspective is great to talk technology, but land sort of the use cases.

So let's talk, there's a whole jump within S11 to A20 Pro and M6 to 2 nanometer. There's been lots of speculation. Everybody loves to figure out when Apple's going to go to next process technology. There's obviously good reasons to do this, but I'd love to just know the whole product line is on kind of 2 nanometer. What does that mean? Why is it significant? What are some of the things that that enables in terms of performance per watt, and any of those things around product benefits to that new process technology?

Sri Santhanam (2:22)

Yeah, sure. I'm glad you brought up the point about vertical integration because sometimes when we build a new SOC, people talk about the process technology node, but it's more than just that. We optimize obviously with process in mind, but architecture, design, implementation, packaging, the entire system, the vertical stack really is what makes our SOC shine.

There are many years where we actually don't get a process technology bump, and we still innovate across these other dimensions, but you're right. This year, we had some tailwind going into two nanometer, and with that higher transistor density, we were able to do things in like A20 Pro. We doubled the neural engine.

We added extra GPU core. We added extra memory channels for more memory bandwidth into the chip, and also we were able to increase the performance of many of the compute blocks on the chip with the two nanometer transistors. We had a 20 percent faster CPU relative to the predecessor, a 40 percent faster GPU, and we want to do this in an efficient way. We want to deliver performance efficiently, and not all of that comes from the process technology. A lot of design effort went in to reducing the power of all of the compute blocks, whether it's increasing IPC or lowering power. It all came together. It's because we want to deliver performance efficiency and features to drive the product, so it was a good tailwind.

Kaiann Drance (3:58)

Yeah, and two things come to mind based on what you said. Having the two nanometer across the different chips from S11 all the way to the M-series is the scalable architecture that we have. So in fact, we're talking the other day, the S11 chip actually inherits the CPU GPU neural engine architecture, and then as you go up, we're still using that two nanometer process node and being able to have a lot of things that we end up learning and sharing across the chips, such as the packaging from the M-series chips coming down to the A20 Pro this year.

When we designed it in that vertically integrated way, we have a chance to look at not just the rote performance that you're going to get out of the great chip design, but also how do we get it to be its best within the system. Within both the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and the iPhone Duo this year, we had custom thermal solutions designed in and using that custom package, we were able then to put the chip right on the vapor chamber to allow us to get the best sustained performance throughout. Running the strong AI workloads and gaming, not just having a peak performance, but big improvements, the sustained improvements as well. That allowed us to look at it across the device to the end user.