But seriously, is it possible to analyze the modern chips like Apple M1 using the same methods? To find out, for instance, why there are so much more efficient than Intel CPUs?
It'd almost certainly need some other kind of microscopy to start digging into them because the feature sizes are going to be on the orders of 10s of nanometers if not smaller. Combine that with the sheer massive size in terms of both physical die and how many transistors, it's almost certainly technically possible to do but it's going to be so much more difficult that it's pragmatically not doable for anyone except giant conglomerates or nation state actors on such chips.
I'd also imagine that some of the higher level things like efficiency and larger behavior would be essentially impossible to do from that side too. I suspect you'd be more likely to be able to get that through the more usual corporate espionage pathways than by trying to reverse it from hardware. Things like figuring out how the clock domains and such act asynchronously and other things like that to power down certain regions of the circuits is and other behavior isn't really going to be obvious from the silicon and metal layers.
But seriously, is it possible to analyze the modern chips like Apple M1 using the same methods? To find out, for instance, why there are so much more efficient than Intel CPUs?
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