Apple Flexes its Chip Muscle in New Phones, Tablets, and Desktops

Apple is known as a consumer electronics company, but its online press conference Tuesday took on an under the hood engineering tone, as the company touted its leading-edge performance of its increasingly powerful processor chips in its latest consumer products.  

No matter what the platform (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) today’s consumer electronics devices are increasingly being asked to manipulate higher amounts of data at higher speeds for applications such as gaming, graphics design, virtual reality, and streaming of high-end video content, Apple has made inroads into high-end processors in recent years. The company introduced its M1 processor in November 2020 and has subsequently added higher-performance variants.

Apple is utilizing chlplet-type chip architecture and packaging technologies in its newest chips, producing a system on a chip that employs a staggering 114 billion transistors. Apple contends this is the most ever in a personal computer chip.

Spencer Chin is a Senior Editor for Design News covering the electronics beat. He has many years of experience covering developments in components, semiconductors, subsystems, power, and other facets of electronics from both a business/supply-chain and technology perspective. He can be reached at [email protected].

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