Apple A19 Soc Die Shot
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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The post shares a die shot of Apple's A19 SoC, sparking discussion and awe among commenters about the complexity and achievement of modern chip manufacturing.
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Sep 23, 2025 at 3:12 PM EDT
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This definitely isn't the original, since the blue text at the bottom right isn't even legible.
"High Resolution Floorplan images available here"
With some contact info below that
It is moved to the end of the page on mobile it seems
> Call Us
> Write to us
The A19 appears to be remarkably intricate chip.
ASML machines are hitting tin droplets with 25kW laser 50,000 times a second to turn them into plasma to create the necessary extreme ultraviolet light, and despite generating 500W of EUV, only a small fraction can reach the wafer, due to loses along the way. I believe it was like 10%.
Here’s an incredible, very detailed video about it: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg
Maybe the high water usage is at some other stage? Or intermediate preceding stages? I'd love to understand more end-to-end, as surely it isn't as easy as popping a wafer in a semi-truck trailer sized lithography machine.
One thing to understand is that you’re seeing an accumulation of over 50 years of incredible engineering and cutting edge science, these things were invented incrementally.
One thing I am curious about - how many generations of process shrink is one of these machines good for? They talk about regular EUV and then High-NA EUV for finer processes, but presumably each machine works for multiple generations of process shrink? If so, what needs to be adjusted to move to a finer generation of lithography and how is it done? Does ASML come in and upgrade the machine for the next process generation, or does it come out of the box already able to deliver to a resolution a few steps beyond the current state of the art?
https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos
Even the video about zippers was fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d6eNmtHFQk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5783jPTKzjk
https://chipsandcheese.com/
(For about ten years now..)
The driving force behind the reviews for mobiles and related topics at AT was Andrei Frumusanu. His reviews had a level of depth very few even on AT could touch. But he left to work for Qualcomm so that ended his reviewer stint.
[0] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/70653/anandtech-founder-sent-...
The “scandal” was unsubstantiated assertions in a Nuvia legal filing. Basically Apple accused Nuvia of poaching employees. In responding trying to show they were good guys, Nuvia said Anand sent them powerpoint slides marked confidential, but they responded that the communication was inappropriate. The case ultimately went to nowhere: https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/apple_nuvia_lawsuit/.
This doesn’t mean anything other than some lawyer thought it would be a good optics. I bet Apple’s default powerpoint slide template has confidential headers. And Nuvia would be right to cover its ass by responding the way it did—they don’t want anything marked Apple confidential in their possession even if the actual content of the slide is public information. Inclusion of the correspondence in the Nuvia legal filing could even have been a prophylactic measure, intended to get out in front of the evidence before Apple seized on it to show Nuvia did anything wrong.
Just don’t believe stuff in legal filings. It’s not that they’re untrue, it’s that they’re definitionally self-serving and selected to paint the other side in the worst light possible. That’s a byproduct of our adversarial system.
As someone who knows nothing about PCB, from those images it appears that double side printing of some sort is happening.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think what you're seeing is the silicon layers visible from the back through the bulk substrate, and the metal layers on the front.
English subtitles are recommended, unless you are better at Chinese than I am.
ARM were catching up to Apple in terms of big core, now Apple has leapfrogged in E-Core again. But competition is good. ARM should have some announcement coming in next few months.
But I did colorize the A19 die photo with Apple's M1 rainbow gradient, just for fun: https://oldbytes.space/@kenshirriff/115256179526128051
"too complicated", what an understatement! Even the 386 wasn't exactly simple. The complexity of these modern chips is mind-bendingly immense.
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