Mobile tech in a Mac
What that means in terms of actual hardware is now reflected in the power and performance advantage characteristic of Apple silicon. And it’s a direct result of the original design decisions made about to the iPhone — decisions such as building chips optimized in such a way that the most “efficient part of the performance versus power curve coincides with the maximum sustained thermal envelope of the device its going into.”
In other words, Apple’s chips are built to deliver their most efficient performance when the devices are being used for quite demanding tasks. This can scale up for short-term higher-end chores, and tick down when all you want to do is check email or pick up some more cookies and adware while browsing. That efficiency by design, in conjunction with the hardware and software Apple also designs, makes for longer battery life and higher performance per watt.
It also makes for the sort of power efficiency you need to run multiple operations on the GPU, which makes Apple silicon highly suitable for on-device AI. It might seem ironic, but the design decisions made for the iPhone directly contributed to the processor choices Apple has made for its fleet of private cloud compute servers.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
