For a long time, in the field of ARM chips, and apple have always been superior. The performance and energy consumption ratio of Apple's self-developed ARM chips far exceed those of their peers. Whether it is the A series chips used on iPhone or the M series chips used on Mac, they are considered to be products that surpass other companies' ARM chips by several generations. Especially in terms of single-core performance, compared with current flagship chips such as Qualcomm and MediaTek , the 2019 A13 chip is still competitive. This shows how strong Apple's research and development strength is.
However, the situation seems to have changed now, especially after Apple's chips entered the 5nm process, both A series chips and M series chips seem to have encountered marginal effects. Including the latest A16 chip, the improvement in performance and energy consumption ratio is actually very limited, and multi-core performance seems to be gradually caught up by Qualcomm and MediaTek. Although everyone has high hopes for Apple's 3nm chips next year, more people still have questions: What happened to Apple?
Although there are many reasons to explain Apple's stagnation in chip research and development, the real problem seems to come from the brain drain within Apple. Many media and industry insiders have revealed that Apple's chip department is now experiencing a serious brain drain. Among them, engineers and executives are leaving in search of better opportunities and an improved work environment. In this regard, Apple's technology research and development department executives are also worried about this matter, worried that Apple's chips and corresponding products will lose their competitiveness and be gradually overtaken by Qualcomm and other competitors.
More than one media reported that although Apple’s A-series processors continue to lead the smartphone processor market in terms of performance. But the range of performance upgrades between each generation has become smaller and smaller. Although this problem has technical and chip manufacturing limitations, another important reason is the current situation caused by the resignation of many senior executives and engineers in Apple's chip department, which makes Apple's chips not meet people's expectations in terms of technology and performance.
If we look at technical bottlenecks alone, Apple’s newly launched A16 Bionic processor has been revealed to have quite a few flaws. It is reported that Apple has decided to provide the A16 chip with ray tracing function in the early stages of design, and has even implemented this function during the research and development stage. However, later in the chip test, it was shown that if the light tracing function is added, the power consumption of the chip will be too high and cannot be used in iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. So in the end, Apple had to settle for the next best thing, unable to update the architecture of the A16 chip, and could only continue to use the design of the previous generation A15 Bionic GPU.
In terms of brain drain, Apple has had a large number of engineers who design chips quit, putting Apple under increasing pressure to develop processors, and it may even be surpassed by competitors. For example, an Apple engineer founded Nuvia after leaving his job in 2019, and was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm. Qualcomm created the Oryon chip based on the chip designed by the engineer and will debut in 2023.
In order to prevent more engineers from leaving the company, Apple began to hold some internal speeches, trying to convince its employees that a career at Apple is more rewarding and stable, and that there are huge risks in jumping to other companies. It is still unknown whether this approach is effective, but analysts believe that in the current environment, if the economy continues to recession, Apple's current engineers may be more willing to work at Apple instead of taking greater risks to start a business or change jobs.
At present, the performance gap between Apple's A-series processors and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors has become smaller and smaller. Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has narrowed the gap, especially in multi-core performance and has caught up with Apple. If the 3nm process A17 Bionic chip launched by Apple in 2023 continues to stagnate in performance as it does now. Then, the relevant processors launched by Qualcomm and MediaTek at the end of 2023 may surpass Apple in performance.
