Bournemouth — Oct 19th 2021

11 members and 1 visitor turned out on a wet Autumn evening, lured by the prospect of All Fired Up’s excellent coffee and cake - and maybe also by the prospect of Euan explaining why Apple’s M series of chips represent a significant technological advance.

Euan’s presentation covered the various processes involved in chip manufacture, from spark erosion, chemical etching through to the use of extreme ultraviolet light, necessary to achieve the tiny feature sizes of the latest chips. Fabrication of modern chips is fully automated and takes place in a Nitrogen-filled, sealed environment.

Apple’s latest M1 chip contains around 51 billion transistors. With that degree of integration, some imperfections are inevitable and so the design is broken down into ‘chiplets’ and provision is made to isolate non-functioning areas by fusable links. These less-than-perfect chips then can be used in lower specification machines instead of having to be scrapped.

Interconnection between chiplets is a major challenge and Apple holds patents on its novel approach to this problem. This, combined with the use of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architecture, results in a high performance chip with low power consumption which, unlike PC chips, can maintain full performance when operating on battery power.

Euan closed by making the point that, whereas Apple have all aspects of the product design under their control, producing a general purpose chip of this sort which could be used by a variety of PC manufacturers was a significantly greater challenge.

[Post-meeting note: despite some forecasts, Apple does not use chiplets in the new SoCs though it does apparently use a similar logical design to allow failed CPU/GPU cores to be disabled, thus rescuing the parts for use in lower-spec Macs]

After a coffee break, with a bit of time to spare, Tony produced an Apple Airtag which was passed around and demonstrated.

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