Regarding Apple’s core-making team, we hear mostly praises. They have worked hard and tried their best. After ten years of deployment, the debut of the M series is the pinnacle.
▲ Johny Srouji
, Senior Vice President of Apple Hardware, walked from a hidden and quiet corner to the spotlight of disturbances. Apple's core-making team led by Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Apple Hardware, has also begun to be well known to the world.
Since the release of M1 in 2020, Johny Srouji has also frequently appeared in public, telling the world about the excellence of Apple's self-developed chips.
When we thought that Apple would take another leap forward on the core-making milestone with the M chip, the A16 Bionic, which was unveiled in September this year, flashed past Keynote in performance, specifications, etc.
Subsequently, with the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro series, in specific tests, the A16 Bionic squeezed a tube of toothpaste without success.
▲ iPhone 14
equipped with an old chip Even in the standard version of the iPhone 14, Apple also rarely used the "old chip" A15 Bionic, which broke the rules of a new machine with a new chip.
The outside world has many speculations about this. Some estimate that Apple's move is actually for cost considerations, and some say that TSMC's foundry has insufficient production capacity.
A recent report by The Information basically answered the phenomenon of Apple’s new machine and old core, A16 Bionic squeezing toothpaste, etc., and even revealed some problems exposed within Apple’s core-making team.
A16 Bionic, rather A15 Plus
As early as September before the birth of A16 Bionic, ARM announced a new generation of public version architecture, CPU focused on optimization and enhancement, while GPU innovated the architecture, and gradually began to introduce the "ray tracing" "support.
▲ New GPU ray tracing demo demo (moving picture with compression), pay attention to the changes in light and shadow. Picture from: Arm
Sure enough, in the flagship chips of the Android camp such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen2 and MediaTek Dimensity 9200 released at the end of the year, the GPU shows the High performance, and the popularization of "ray tracing", seem to have entered the "ray tracing era" at once.
It’s not just that, thanks to the previous generations of thunderstorms, the energy efficiency performance of the new generation of SoC has also reached a new level, which in turn has raised the performance of Android flagships at the end of the year to a higher level.
Back before the release of the A16 Bionic, Apple’s core-making team was ambitious because they had introduced many innovative specifications, performance and features on their GPUs, including support for “ray tracing”.
And in the process of development, A16 Bionic has considerable processing power. As long as it goes on the market as scheduled, I don't know how much higher it will be than those "breaking the sky" functions.
▲ The red box is the GPU part
However, in the prototype stage, due to engineering design flaws, the GPU of the A16 Bionic could not calm down. energy consumption.
In the end, the GPU of the new architecture was abandoned by Apple, and instead chose a safe upgrade strategy, which was taken from the GPU of A15 Bionic, and made a simple iterative upgrade, and finally became the iPhone 14The SoC on the Pro series.
▲ iPhone 15 rendering
And the new GPU that was originally expected to appear on the iPhone 15 (that is, the A17 Bionic) is not ruled out, provided that the Apple core team finds out how to fix the power consumption under high load, A series of problems such as heat accumulation.
changed the design on the spot, and also made the A16 Bionic, which would have drawn a lot of color in the history of A-series chips, become a dispensable existence.
Such a change is also called by the information as an "unprecedented" failure in the history of Apple's core manufacturing.
also affected the formation of the new iphone from the side. In order to deliberately widen the gap between Pro and non-Pro, Apple was also "forced" to equip the iPhone basic series with the old A15 Bionic chip.
A hidden worry of Apple’s core-making team
Replacing the A16’s GPU design is like a butterfly flapping its wings in South America, causing a storm in North America. The "storm" of
can be said to be a re-planning of Apple's iPhone 14 series positioning, sales and other strategies, and it also directly affects the follow-up plans of Apple's chip team, including products and personnel.
This engineering design mistake allowed Apple to reorganize the GPU team and adjust some project managers and key personnel in order to solve the defects of the current new GPU and revive the original plan of the A-series chips.
is not only an internal adjustment, some Apple chip development talents have also begun to lose. According to the information report, many of them have flowed to Rivos and Nuvia, the chip start-up teams in Silicon Valley.
▲ Nuvia was founded by Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati
Nuvia and Rivos were also founded by key figures from the former Apple chip team. Among them, William, one of the founders of Nuvia, participated in the development and design of A7~A12X, and has been Assumed a leadership role. In addition to chip design, in the first few years of founding Nuvia, he also served as the layout design of the A chip.
"In the past few years, A-series chip GPU performance has been limited. The chip's CPU performance growth has slowed down significantly."
Recently, Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm , and began to become a springboard for Qualcomm's self-developed Arm architecture chips. In other words, part of Apple's core core team was poached by Qualcomm.
Rivos, established in 2021, also mainly attracts many Apple chip engineers to join. And Apple claims that these engineers will copy many engineering project files when they leave the company, and then provide them to Rivos. Both of them are currently in related litigation.
Nuvia and Rivos are actually just two representative companies that lost Apple chip engineers. Since 2019, the Apple chip team has lost dozens of key engineers to other chip design companies.
Faced with the recent situation, Apple executives have also begun to talk to working engineers one after another, convincing them that Apple’s work has higher value and is more stable, “much better than those start-up companies that have to take huge risks.”
Apple is also convinced that the general environment of layoffs in the economic downturn will allow more engineers to stay at Apple.
However, what’s interesting is that when Jobs dug people around to form Apple’s core-making team more than ten years ago, he knew that money would not be able to impress these chip tycoons, and instead expressed the hope that they would work with Apple to complete a A historical achievement, that is, the challenge of creating a top-level chip from scratch.
Subsequently, Apple assembled a luxurious core-making team in Silicon Valley at that time, and finally successfully fulfilled its wish at that time ten years later.
And the historic challenge that Jobs said has been completed, and the unbreakable cohesion of Apple's core-making team seems to have begun to loosen. At this time, Johny Srouji, the helm of Apple chips, also needs to make a new plan to revive the core-making goal.
At present, the intergenerational performance improvement of Apple’s self-developed chips is still higher than market expectations. Even though the performance growth of recent generations of chips has slowed down significantly, Apple’s A-series and M-series chips are still unneglectable. The presence.
Especially in terms of energy efficiency, they are still ahead of their competitors of the same generation, but this "gap" is gradually being closed, said Ian Cutress, principal analyst at More Than Moore, "Given Apple's recent personnel changes, can they maintain The original advantages are still unknown.”
In fact, it’s not just the A-series chips that have made “mistakes” recently, but the M Extreme chips have also been compromised before.
At the same time, the postponement of a series of chips such as M2 Pro and M2 Max is also an impact of Apple's core-making team's continuous self-adjustment.
With the successful mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process, Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max may be in the first mass production. The same generation of M chips adopts different processes. Perhaps this is very likely for Apple’s core manufacturing team. will be another milestone.
But this premise is that the 3nm M2 Pro and M2 Max have enough outstanding performance, not just a thorough understanding of the process bonus .
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