This is the confidence brought by self-developed chips
At the spring conference of Apple Connecting High Energy, every time I introduce a new product, I silently give a comment in my heart: iPhone SE, regular upgrade; iPad Air, regular upgrade; M1 Ultra, wow; Mac Studio, rich got a whole one.
Only when Studio Display appeared, I didn’t make a comment, but silently turned my eyes to the Mi 11 Ultra charging aside: “Baby, just now, the performance of a monitor surpassed you.”
What does the A13 in Studio Display bring to it?
What attracts me most about the Studio Display is not the gorgeous and solid parameters, but the A13 bionic chip it is equipped with. The addition of A13 gives it three major functions: character centering, spatial audio, and “Hey Siri”.
With the release of the iPad Air (fifth generation), character centering has become the standard for all iPads, and Studio Display, which uses the A13 chip, brings this feature to the desktop. During a video conference, centering the person can ensure that the participant image is always in the middle of the screen. If someone joins or leaves the screen, the camera angle will be expanded or zoomed in accordingly.
In addition to Apple’s official “FaceTime call”, our commonly used office software such as “Feishu”, “Dingding”, and Zoom are all adapted to this feature. As long as you actually experience it, you can feel an indescribable comfort.
The second is the improvement of audio. With the computing power of the A13 bionic chip, Studio Display’s high-fidelity speaker system can achieve spatial audio, which Apple calls “the sound quality ceiling of the Mac family.”
The last function is “Hey, Siri”. With the A13 chip, Studio Display can detect “Hey Siri” wake commands privately on the device 24/7 and with low power consumption, but Apple spokesman Alex Bender said in an interview that the “Hey Siri” feature on the Studio Display Requires connection to a Mac.
To use the “Hey, Siri” feature on a Mac, you must be a 2018 or later MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac Pro and iMac after 2020. But as long as your Mac is on the Studio Display support list, even older models can use this feature.
Aside from “Hey Siri,” the aforementioned character centering and spatial audio are also enabled for all compatible Macs, up to 2016 MacBook Pros (because they need to run macOS Monterey 12.3).
Although not a buying guide, by the way, Studio Display also works on Windows computers, but will lack features such as character centering, true-color display, “Hey, Siri”, and functions that require a firmware update are also unavailable. So, if you’re a Windows user, this monitor isn’t for you.
Whether it’s spatial audio with a 6-speaker array, centering characters on the screen at any time during video calls, or 24/7, low-power detection of voice commands “Hey Siri”, all compatible Macs can use the full functionality of Studio Display , all require the computing power of the A13 bionic chip.
Adding a “second” chip is nothing new
We have long been accustomed to the chips of mobile phones, computers and other devices, and in order to make relatively traditional devices more intelligent and easy to use, Apple is not the first manufacturer to put chips into devices.
At the CES conference in 2021, Sony released its blockbuster new TVs. These TVs have one thing in common, that is, they are all equipped with a new graphics processor: the XR cognitive chip. If there is one word to describe this chip, it is “smarter”.
After years of iteration, the XR cognitive chip can not only analyze and optimize the brightness, contrast, and color of the picture to improve the look and feel, but also go a step further and optimize specific areas in real time to make the visual focus more vivid and clear.
At the same time, the XR cognitive chip can also convert any sound into 3D stereo surround sound, analyze the position of the sound source on the screen in real time, and align the presented sound source with the screen content, so as to obtain a more realistic sense of presence.
In addition to the display, what we are more familiar with may be the independent chips of mobile phone manufacturers for the differentiation of camera images: Xiaomi’s Surging C1, vivo’s V1, OPPO’s Mariana X and so on.
▲ OPPO self-developed NPU Mariana X
Taking the professional imaging chip V1 on vivo X70 Pro+ as an example, it can preprocess the data obtained by the sensor before the main chip, speed up the image processing speed, and bring better imaging results. It also allows real-time preview of the image characteristics of the mobile phone (such as night scene mode), what you see is what you get.
In addition to the performance improvement, V1 also makes taking photos and videos more power-efficient, with better effects and lower power consumption, making the vivo X70 Pro+ a veritable imaging flagship.
In the field of charging, Xiaomi uses the Pengpai P1 chip to achieve single-cell 120W charging, supports multi-speed voltage transformation, and is more integrated than traditional fast-charging chips. On the premise of maintaining the size of the mobile phone, it also increases the battery capacity. and charging speed.
These independent chips allow devices to have controllable size, better performance, and lower power consumption. Bringing manufacturers who use 8K, Mini-LED, 100 million pixels, 100x zoom and other hardware to compete for performance to a new track.
The luxurious A13 is the confidence of the strongest fortress
When the hardware parameters such as the resolution and material of the display reach the bottleneck (or the cost is too high), it is indeed a good development direction to use the chip to give users a better experience. Just like Sony made the XR cognitive chip a major selling point for TVs, it has improved a lot from picture quality and sound quality to performance and power consumption.
It’s no surprise that Apple added a chip to the display, but even so, the A13 Bionic chip is a bit extravagant.
The first model of the A13 bionic chip was the iPhone 11 series, with a 6-core CPU and a 4-core graphics processor, and was later applied to the iPad series and the second-generation iPhone SE. Studio Display only uses it to implement functions such as “Hey, Siri”. Obviously, it is not used to the fullest. Is it really for clearing inventory?
First of all, of course not to clear inventory, because Apple’s current CEO, Cook, is indeed an “stock buster”. In “Tim Cook Biography”, it is written that after Cook joined Apple for 7 months, he shortened the inventory period of Apple products from 30 days to 6 days. a complete reform. By 1999, the inventory period had been shortened to just 2 days. Even on a 6-day basis, iPhones produced on Monday were sold on Sunday.
Redesigning a new product to use up over-produced raw materials, such as adding more water to more noodles, and adding more water to noodles, is not something that “stock nemesis” will do. The biggest reason for using A13 is still in AI computing power.
As long as you pay attention to the mobile phone processor, you will find that whether it is Qualcomm Snapdragon or Apple A series, the improvement of CPU is gradually toothpaste, while the AI computing power still maintains a substantial increase. The latest A15 bionic chip also has a significant improvement of more than 40% compared to the previous generation. Today, every time we unlock the phone, wake up the voice assistant, and press the shutter, we have the help of AI computing, and functions such as character centering require powerful AI computing power.
On Apple’s official website, we can see the oldest devices supported by these functions: iPhone 6s (A9) and above, to achieve unplugged “Hey, Siri” voice wake-up; Spatial audio requires iPhone 7 (A10) and above models; while the character centering function that appears with the iPad Pro equipped with the M1 chip requires the ninth-generation iPad (A13) and newer models.
It seems that the A13 Bionic chip is the minimum configuration to meet all needs.
Of course, Apple can also redesign a chip for the functions of these displays, but instead of increasing R&D design costs and opening a new assembly line, it just “just happened” that the iPhone SE released the production capacity of the A13 chip, using the 7nm process and more mature technology. The cost of the old design may be lower, even if there is a very large performance redundancy.
▲ iPhone SE (third generation) upgraded the previous generation A13 chip to A15
Compared with the interoperability of iPad, iPhone and even Mac, it is rare to use the same processor on “non-smart” devices such as monitors that cannot install apps, but it is not the first time that Apple has done this. As early as 2017, there was an A8 processor on the HomePod for real-time software modeling, detection of placement, bass management, and recognition of “Hey Siri” commands in noisy environments. “It was actually equipped with an A8 chip” was the surprise of many netizens back then.
When the M1 Ultra doubled its performance and continued to be in the cold, we couldn’t help but sigh that the chip is Apple’s strongest fortress. If the M1 chip is put down to the iPad, there is also the layout of the future productivity of the iPad. Even if the fuselage design of 5 years ago is still used, the iPhone SE is equipped with the latest and strongest A15 chip. Even if it can compete with other flagship chips today, the A13 chip that is still inserted into the display is using huge performance. The excess interprets what is meant by “having a chip means you can do whatever you want”.
▲ The two generations of iPhone SE have almost no changes in appearance
Huawei’s recently released MatePad Paper, which uses the Kirin 820E processor, is an absolute powerhouse in the field of electronic paper books; the surging P1, which has a single-cell 120W fast charge on the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, is now also applied to the Redmi K50 Pro; OPPO Find Li Jie, president of the product line, said that the Mariana chip will continue to be developed, and the debugging of the Dimensity chip and the Mariana chip is also in progress.
Although it is not as good as Apple’s spending on displays, we still hope that one day in the future, domestic manufacturers can also have this confidence from the strongest fortress built by chips.
This article is from the WeChat public account “APPSO” (ID: appsolution), author: Lu Xinyu. 36氪 is authorized to publish.
This article is published with authorization and does not represent the position of 36Kr.
If reproduced, please indicate the source.Source: 36氪
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