Apple discusses its 2017 silicon

There are several errors in this article, one of which is a bad one — the CPU is not 70% more efficient.

Nonetheless, I appreciate when Apple's silicon team provides some information. I think the only technical disclosure in this piece is the redesigned secure element (the Secure Enclave, or SEP). I believe we already knew everything else, if I'm not mistaken.

A three year design lead period for the Neural Engine is to be expected. Apple's "fully custom" GPU is still using tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR), which is Imagination Technologies' IP.

Apple’s silicon team is, for example, obsessed with energy efficiency, but never at the expense of responsiveness.

Meh. I appreciate that pushing single-threaded performance is insanely hard, but I've never been sold on this philosophy. You know what would be a lot more efficient? Getting the software teams to truly care about locked-60fps performance again, as they did until iOS 7. Every Apple device still drops tons of frames, no matter how fast the silicon, and ProMotion isn't a magic bullet solution. That's not the silicon teams' fault.

“We’re thinking ahead, I’ll tell you that, and I don’t think we’ll be limited,” and then he added, almost as a post-script, “It’s getting harder.”

That it is indeed.

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