Regarding and Apple’s core-making team, we have heard mostly complimentary words. They worked hard and worked hard for ten years, and the M series reached its peak when it debuted.
▲ Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware
From a hidden and quiet corner to the chaotic spotlight, Apple’s core manufacturing team under the leadership of Johny Srouji, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware, has also begun to be known to the world.
Since the release of M1 in 2020, Johny Srouji has also appeared frequently, telling the world about the excellence of Apple’s self-developed chips.
Just when we thought that Apple would once again take another step forward in the core manufacturing milestone with the help of the M chip, the A16 Bionic, which was unveiled in September this year, passed by Keynote in terms of performance and specifications without much mention.
Subsequently, with the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro series, in specific tests, the A16 Bionic failed, squeezing out a tube of toothpaste.
▲ iPhone equipped with old chips 14
Even in the standard version of iPhone 14, Apple rarely used the "old chip" A15 Bionic, breaking the rule of new phones and new chips.
There are many speculations about this. Some estimate that Apple’s move is actually due to cost considerations, while others say that TSMC’s foundry has insufficient production capacity.
A recent report by The Information basically gave a positive answer to the phenomenon of old cores in Apple’s new phones and toothpaste squeezed out of A16 Bionic. It even revealed some problems exposed within Apple’s core-making team.
A16 Bionic, better to say A15 Plus
As early as September before the birth of A16 Bionic, ARM announced a new generation of public version architecture. CPU was strengthened around optimization, while GPU innovated the architecture and gradually began to introduce support for "ray tracing".
▲ New GPU ray tracing demonstration Demo (animations are compressed), pay attention to the changes in light and shadow. Picture from: Arm
Sure enough, among the flagship chips of the Android camp such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen2 and MediaTek Dimensity 9200 released at the end of the year, GPU The high performance displayed and the popularization of "ray tracing" seem to have suddenly entered the "ray tracing era".
Not only that, with the success of previous generations, the energy efficiency performance of the new generation SoC has also reached a new level, which in turn has improved the performance of Android flagships at the end of the year.
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 its GPU, including support for "ray tracing".
And under development, the A16 Bionic has considerable processing power. As long as it is launched as scheduled, it will be better than those "sky-breaking" functions.
▲ The red box is the GPU part
However, during the prototype stage, due to engineering design flaws, the A16 Bionic's GPU could not calm down. With high-frequency calls, the temperature also soared, which was also accompanied by higher energy consumption.
In the end, Apple gave up on the new architecture of the GPU and instead chose a prudent upgrade strategy. It took the GPU from the A15 Bionic and made a simple iterative upgrade, eventually becoming the SoC on the iPhone 14 Pro series.
▲ iPhone 15 rendering
The new GPU, which originally had high hopes, cannot be ruled out to appear on the iPhone 15 (that is, the A17 Bionic), provided that Apple’s core-making team finds how to fix a series of problems such as power consumption and heat accumulation under high load.
The sudden design change also made the A16 Bionic, which would have made a mark in the history of A-series chips, become a dispensable existence.
Such a change was also called an "unprecedented" failure in the history of Apple's core manufacturing by the information.
This has also affected the deployment 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 basic iPhone series with the old A15 Bionic chip.
The hidden worries of Apple’s core-making team
Replacing the GPU design of A16 is like a butterfly flapping its wings in South America, causing a storm in North America.
This "storm" can be said to be a re-planning of Apple's entire iPhone 14 series positioning, sales and other strategies. It also directly affects the subsequent plans of the Apple chip team, including products and personnel.
This engineering design mistake led Apple to reorganize the GPU team and adjust some project managers and key figures in order to solve the shortcomings of the current new GPU and revive the original planned improvement of the A-series chips.
It’s not just internal adjustments. Some of Apple’s chip development talents have also begun to lose. According to reports from the information, many of them have gone to Silicon Valley chip start-up teams Rivos and Nuvia.
▲ Nuvia was founded by Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati
Nuvia and Rivos were also founded by key figures in 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 always held a leadership role. In addition to chip design, he was also responsible for the layout design of A chips in the first few years when he founded Nuvia.
"The GPU performance improvement of A-series chips has been limited in the past few years. This is mainly an optimization of the original architecture rather than a redesign." Dylan Patel, chief analyst at Semi Analysis, also said that "since William left, the CPU performance growth of Apple's A-series chips has slowed down significantly."
Recently, Nuvia was acquired by Qualcomm and began to become a springboard for Qualcomm to lay out self-developed Arm architecture chips. In other words, part of Apple’s core core team was poached by Qualcomm.
Rivos, founded in 2021, also mainly attracted many Apple chip engineers to join. And Apple claims that these engineers copied many engineering project files when they left and subsequently provided them to Rivos. Both of them are currently engaged in related litigation.
Nuvia and Rivos are actually just two representative companies that have lost Apple chip engineers. Since 2019, the Apple chip team has lost dozens of key engineers to other chip design companies.
Faced with the current situation, Apple executives have also begun to talk to working engineers one after another, convincing them that Apple's jobs have higher value and more stability, "much better than startups 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 is interesting is that when Jobs was poaching people to form Apple's core manufacturing team more than ten years ago, he knew that money could not impress these chip giants. Instead, he expressed his hope that they would complete a historical achievement with Apple, which is the challenge of building a top-notch chip from scratch.
Subsequently, Apple gathered the luxurious core-making team in Silicon Valley at the time, and finally, ten years later, successfully fulfilled its wish at that time.
And the historic challenge that Jobs mentioned 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 head of Apple's chips, also needs to make a new plan to revive the goal of core manufacturing.
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 something that cannot be ignored.
Especially in terms of energy efficiency, it is still ahead of its competitors of the same generation, but this "gap" is gradually being closed. Ian Cutress, chief analyst of More Than Moore, said, "Given Apple's recent personnel changes, it is still unknown whether they can maintain their original advantage."
In fact, it is not just the A series chips that have recently made "mistakes". Previously, there were actually some compromises with the M Extreme top-end chips.
At the same time, the postponement of a series of chips such as M2 Pro and M2 Max is also an impact caused by the continuous self-adjustment of Apple’s core manufacturing team.
With the successful mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process, Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max may be in the first batch of production. M chips of the same generation use different processes. Perhaps this will most likely become another milestone for Apple’s core manufacturing team.
But this premise is that the 3nm M2 Pro and M2 Max have sufficiently impressive performance, not just a thorough understanding of the process bonus .
