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A comment on The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting to Know Oryon.

Re:The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting... by krackers on Thursday June 13, 2024 @09:16PM (#40676628)
Naive question: if the team behind this is essentially the same folks who pioneered Apple's A/M series, does that mean that basically there's basically very few people in the world who are capable of designing these high-performance SoCs?

When I tried to skim what was so "special" about the apple M1 secret sauce, older HNs posts said that it was basically just a well-executed design (large RoB, beefy cache, wide pipelines, etc.) using the latest tsmc node. But even in the years since then it doesn't seem like any other companies have managed to design something comparable, and it basically took this team of ex-apple folks to produce something similar.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting... by choilive on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:34PM (#40677289)
The short answer is: Yes. The most best and most talented chip designers (think the top 0.01%+) - especially if you put together the right team of them - are orders of magnitude better. Would you have 1 Magnus Carlsen or 100 average chess players? Jordan, Pippen, Rodman, et al. or a bunch of college players?

Chip design is one of those fields where there is no skill ceiling to how good you can be, so having the best people means you can crush the competition.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting... by AtlasBarfed on Friday June 14, 2024 @11:04AM (#40681570)
What are the salaries for these people? I've heard they are hilariously underpaid.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting... by choilive on Monday June 17, 2024 @01:25AM (#40702556)
The run of the mill engineer is indeed quite underpaid, but thats mostly because there is a mountain of gruntwork required to develop a modern chipset even with all of the automation tools out there. The engineers architecting the next generation of chips (think Jim Keller and the like) have millions or tens of millions in stock options.
[ Parent | on HN ]