For a long time, in the field of mobile phone chips, no SOC from other manufacturers can compete with Apple's A series. However, things have turned around this year.

For a long time, in the field of mobile phone chips , facing the A series of Apple , other manufacturers' SOC can be said to be no match. However, things have turned around this year.

Apple's latest A16 chip is only a toothpaste-like upgrade compared to the previous generation. This has also led to Qualcomm the latest 8 Gen2 and MediaTek the latest Dimensity 9200 to catch up with the A16 in the GPU part. The CPU part has also changed from being far away from the original to going back and forth with the A15. Some people may think that Apple is stopping to wait for its friends, but the fact may be that a large number of Apple's chip engineers have left.

Foreign technology media The Information reported that Apple's chip department has experienced serious brain drain, with engineers and executives leaving in search of better opportunities and improved working environments. Johnny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technology, is worried about this matter.

The most direct result of brain drain is technical bottlenecks. A very intuitive example is: Apple’s new A16 processor decided to support ray tracing in the early stages of design and made it an important upgrade point. Later tests showed that the power consumption was too high, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max could not be used normally, and the team was unable to optimize the power consumption issue. This also resulted in the A16 processor continuing to use a GPU architecture similar to the A15 Bionic, and the performance increase was very limited.

In addition to processor performance issues, the self-developed baseband that has been unable to be applied is also caused by brain drain. In July 2019, Apple acquired the baseband chip business of Intel for US$1 billion. Three years later, Apple originally hoped to make up for its shortcomings through this acquisition, but in fact Apple overestimated itself, and the loss of talent affected the development of baseband to a certain extent.

This also means that Apple will have to wait longer before officially using its self-developed 5G chips. Compared with Apple's other self-developed chips, the baseband chip is a completely different type and much more difficult, because the communication function must be taken into consideration, which is very different from computer and mobile phone chips. Apple does not have the genes in this area. The technical strength of the

team is far less than it used to be, while competitors are constantly catching up. More and more engineers are changing jobs, putting increasing pressure on Apple to develop processors, and it may even be surpassed by its competitors. Gerard Williams III, a well-known designer on the Apple chip team, founded Nuvia after leaving his job in 2019. It was later acquired by its old rival Qualcomm. Based on this, Qualcomm designed the Oryon architecture, which will be unveiled in 2023.

In order to prevent more engineers from leaving the company, Apple began to give employees a pie, persuading them that staying at Apple would provide better returns and greater stability, and that switching to other companies would be a huge risk. Many experts predict that the U.S. economy will decline, and more engineers may stay at Apple as a result.

analyst said: If the performance of Apple's A17 is still toothpaste in 2023, Qualcomm and MediaTek's processors by the end of 2023 may surpass Apple.