Broadcom BCM5780 Mid-and-South Bridges (PCIe Power Mac G5)

When the Dual-Core PowerPC 970MP third-generation G5 CPUs came out in Mid-2005, Apple had to start using a brand new Mid Bridge chip for the Macs along with it. Since the AMD 8131 only had PCI-X bridges and no PCIe bus, they couldn’t keep the old chip, replacing it with the BCM5780. (Above: Block diagram […]

AMD-8131 PCI-X Midbridge Chip (2003-05 PCI-X Power Mac G5 only)

Have you ever wondered why there’s an AMD chip on the back of your Power Mac G5’s logic board, or what it’s even doing there? For higher end Mid-2003 thru Early 2005 Power Mac G5s, that’s the PCI-X “Mid Bridge” chip. This is what handles all your expansion cards! Although, it doesn’t appear in Late-2005 […]

IBM CPC945 Northbridge chip tech specs (Late 2005 Macs)

The IBM CPC945 is a redesigned Northbridge chip mostly for the Dual-Core PowerPC 970MP CPU. It has technical upgrades over the IBM CPC925, including a faster HyperTransport Bus. It’s also capable of talking to the PowerPC 970fx second-generation G5 chip, which means it may be found in other Late 2005 Macs on the logic board. […]

Metal 4: An overview

Metal is the current generation of low-level graphical API that Apple uses, which powers the hardware accelerated graphics on their OSes, namely macOS. Metal 1.0 was introduced on September 30th, 2015, alongside Mac OS X El Capitan and iOS 8. Before the Apple Silicon transition, the Metal API received regular major updates every 2 years. […]

Apple Silicon – “Apple A1” S5L8900 chip specs

This page details the full hardware profile of the Apple Silicon “A1” Samsung S5L8900 chip.   Name: “Apple A1” MFG: Samsung Released: June 29th, 2007 Codename: APL0098 Part Number: S5L8900 Fabrication Process: 90-Nanometer Transistor Count: ~125 Million CPU ISA: ARMv6 (32-Bit) . RAM Information: Memory Bus Width: 16-Bit Total channels: 1 Bit per channel: 16-Bit […]

Apple Silicon – A18 Pro chip specs

This page details the full hardware profile of the Apple Silicon A18 Pro chip.   Name: A18 Pro Released: September 9th, 2024 Codename: APL1V07 Part Number: T8140 Fabrication Process: TSMC’s 3-Nanometer Transistor Count: 20-Billion CPU ISA: ARMv9.2-A . . Memory Bus Width: 64-Bit Total channels: 4 Bit per channel: 16-Bit Memory Type: LPDDR5X-7500 3750 Mhz […]

HDMI 2.2 is out: 16K at 60 Hz, 96Gbps, and more

The HDMI forum just announced a brand new update to the HDMI specification. This includes major upgrades in available bandwidth, screen resolutions, as well as a new HDMI cable feature name called Ultra96. HDMI is now up to version 2.2, up from the previous 2.1b specification from August 2023. Download: HDMI-2-2-Specification-Overview-20250625.pdf.zip (1.8MB) . (Above: Illustration […]

Apple Silicon – M1 chip specs

This page details the full hardware profile of the Apple Silicon M1 chip.   Name: M1 Chip Released: November 17th, 2020 Codename: APL1102 Part Number: T8103 Fabrication Process: TSMC’s 5-Nanometer Transistor Count: 16-Billion CPU ISA: ARMv8.5-A . . Memory Bus Width: 128-Bit Total channels: 2 Bit per channel: 64-Bit Memory Type: LPDDR4X-4266 (2133 MHz) ~Bandwidth: […]

11th-Generation iPad (Early 2025)

You take the 10th-gen iPad from 2022, give it some iPhone 14 Pro parts, and bam – new iPad. No Apple Intelligence on this model due to system constraints, although it gains an extra 2 GB of RAM from the previous generation like how other Apple devices received a RAM upgrade across the line. Considering […]

M3 iPad Air (Early 2025)

Back in 2021 roughly half a year after Apple Silicon was released to the consumer market, we got our first iteration of an iPad with a desktop-class CPU in it – the M1 iPad Pro. They chucked an M1 into an iPad Air a year later, and fast forward to 2025 – we now have […]