New releases from Apple show how the company keeps ramping up its chip design, while enduring downward pressure on production continues to hamper the actual rollout of chip-containing discreetly manufactured products.
Right now, Apple is touting its new M1 Ultra, a system-on-a-chip made of two M1 Max chips connected together. The 114 billion transistors on the chip provide 128 GB of memory and 80 GB per second of bandwidth, for a system that has a 20 core CPU and GPU cores up to 64.
“Built from two M1 Max chips, M1 Ultra lets you power through workflows on an unprecedented scale,” write Apple spokespersons. “So you can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render. And with twice the media engine resources, M1 Ultra can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback — something no other personal computer can do.”
All of that sounds amazingly cutting-edge, but there’s still the matter of actually producing these chips.
When you do the research, you see that the company responsible for making Apple’s Max and Ultra chips is TSMC, the same company that is serving a wide spectrum of clients all over the world.
As the powerhouse of chip design, TSMC suggests that chip shortage is are likely to continue through 2022.
“During a recent conference call, TSMC chief executive C.C. Wei told investors that demand continues to be high and ‘this shortage will continue throughout this year and maybe extended into 2022,’” writes Michael Feghali at PC Invasion. “He also claims that geopolitical tensions caused the chip shortage and pushed clients to stockpile chips and build up their inventories. On a positive note, C.C. Wei expects shortages to reduce in the next few months, allowing TSMC to “offer more capacity to support [its] customers” in 2023.”
Strangely enough, although TSMC is a Taiwanese company, some of these chips are likely to be produced in the U.S. when TSMC finishes its new Arizona plant.
However, delays there have contributed to industry scarcities.
The bottom line is that when chip shortages are alleviated, we’re going to be seeing a lot more sophistication and complexity in the chips built into our cars and devices.