As we await more details on Apple Silicon and the upcoming iPad Air, Apple executives Tim Millet and Tom Boger recently joined Relay FM’s Upgrade podcast to talk about the Mac and iPad lineups, including details on the A14 processor, how the iPad used internally at Apple, and much more.
Millet serves as Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, while Boger is the company’s senior director of Mac and iPad product marketing.On the iPad Air’s new Touch ID functionality, Boger explained:
One of the goals of the iPad Air is to make some of these fantastic technologies more accessible. What we wanted to do was bring that new design to the iPad Air, that Liquid Retina Display, have that display extend in all sides, and we decided with this iPad Air that we will engineer Touch ID right into the top button. It’s a really incredible feat of engineering.
On the new 5nm process used for the A14 chip, Millet explained:
It is a big win for us because it allows us to put more transistors down in a similar space. What this allows us to do is to deliver more features, which in a lot of cases also allows us to improve the energy efficiency of the solution, because we can go wider and run the clocks a little slower at a lower voltage. That translates to lower energy usage.
Things like a GPU for example, we can enhance the GPU, we can run those four cores at a lower voltage and still deliver amazing performance. We can also take those same transistors and raise the voltage and boost the performance of that GPU way, way up for brief periods of time when a game demands something really snappy.
The full interview with Boger and Millet is well worth a listen for more in-depth detail on Apple Silicon and the iPad lineup. You can listen to Upgrade on the Relay FM website, or subscribe to the show via Apple Podcasts.
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