Six Colors
Six Colors

by Jason Snell & Dan Moren

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Digging into Apple’s custom silicon

Ars Technica’s Samuel Axon scored an interview with Apple’s Phil Schiller and Anand Shimpi all about Apple’s custom silicon in the new iPad Pro. It’s an interesting read, and a rare dive into the nitty gritty technical details.

The iPad Pro outperforms every MacBook Pro we tested except for the most recent, most powerful 15-inch MacBook Pro with an 8th generation Intel Core i9 CPU. Generally, these laptops cost three times as much as the iPad Pro.

“You typically only see this kind of performance in bigger machines—bigger machines with fans,” Shimpi claimed. “You can deliver it in this 5.9 millimeter thin iPad Pro because we’ve built such a good, such a very efficient architecture.”

Ars also gets into the more interesting context to these chip discussions: namely, how does Apple’s venture into custom silicon affect the future of the Mac? That remains one of the most interesting and exciting potential stories of—likely—the next year or two, so it’s interesting to pick up the breadcrumbs here and there.

—Linked by Dan Moren

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