When their desktop computing and laptop computing pipeline was essentially controlled by the third-party merchants and silicon vendors, it didn’t really allow for Apple to push the bar closer to the limits of technology.
This need to own and “reset” the baseline of portable performance in computing coalesced around the time that Apple started working on the iPad Pro. They had been building chips inside of these super-thin enclosures and knew that, with ready power and much larger casings, they could make a significant impact on portable computing.
“Once we started getting to the iPad Pro space, we realized that ‘you know what, there is something there.’ We never, in building the chips for iOS devices, left anything on the table. But we realized that these chips inside these other enclosures could actually make a meaningful difference from a performance perspective. And so with M1 we were super excited about the opportunity to have that big impact — shifting all of it back up to redefining what it meant to have a laptop in many different ways.”
The work that Apple did with the M1 wasn’t focused on pure peak performance, says Millet. From the beginning, there was this idea that they’d be able to reset user expectations around what kind of performance you should be able to get out of a portable computer, and for how long. The focus on performance per watt paid off (as noted in my early review of Apple’s first M1 chip), in that people could run major compute tasks on laptops untethered from power for hours. No compromises. That, says Millet, wasn’t a byproduct — it was the intent from the beginning.
“We wanted to have the ability to build a scale of solutions that deliver the absolute maximum performance for machines that had no fan; for machines that had active cooling systems like our pro class machines. We wanted to…move performance per watt to the point where we delivered real usable performance in these in a wide range of machines.”
The M1 whacked a big old reset button on those restrictions, putting portable back into the power computing lexicon. And with M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.
“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.”
“As a silicon person, I know that technology moves fast and I don’t want to wait around. I certainly want to push hard, as you can imagine,” says Millet. “We want to get the technology into the hands of our system team as soon as possible, in the hands of our customer as soon as possible. We don’t want to leave them wondering…do they not care about us? A new phone shipped last year. Why didn’t the Mac get the love?”
Millet added that “We want to reset to the technology curve and then we want to live on it. We don’t want the Mac to stray too far away from it.”
This is an interesting interview that touches on gaming and there's a lot more to it over at TechCrunch. Gaming is an interest of Millet's going back to his 7 years with Silicon Graphics (1992-1999).
With Qualcomm's first next-gen chip from the NUVIA team branded 'Qualcomm Oryon CPU coming this fall, Apple has to push the envelope to ensure that Macs and iDevices will remain the leader in performance with the M2 and M3 processors.