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Key iOS Chip Architect Gerard Williams III Departs Apple
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Seriously. Hahaha.
Ok sure.
Except apples 2018 a12 Soc with the 8 core npu is still 2 years ahead of anything on Android, qualcomm might catch up to the a12 next year, but apple will have the 5 a14 by then and another 2 year lead, .
Also worth mentioning 3D facial recognition, nvme based storage, 120hz touch-sensing display, stainless steel frame, outstanding dual speakers, dolby vision capable display as other “last leads” apple has secured over its competitors.
I won’t even bring up the Apple Watch and the AirPods or apples ecosystem.
Mind boggling. At the conclusion of it all, what end use(s) of your labors gives you the most pride, and what use(s) seem a waste?
I was just always happy when i could walk into a Best Buy, or a fry’s, and point to a computer that had a chip in it that I worked on. The biggest deal for me was the original K8 (athlon 64/opteron). We didn’t have a Merced license, and a massive number of people quit AMD pretty much all at once at the conclusion of the K6 spins. Morale was awful. Our CTO took about 15 of us to Le Papillon, a fancy Silicon Valley restaurant, and more or less sketched out a plan on a napkin and asked us to declare whether we were in or out (most, but not all, were in). We had a super tiny team. No head architect - I was forced to create the 64-bit extensions to the x86 integer operations on my own, then decide on my own how many cycles things like a multiply would take. (I was not known for my architectural acumen - I was primarily a logic/circuit/methodology designer). If i recall correctly i started out responsible for floating point and integer execution, then moved on to integer execution and scheduling? After a first cut at that I moved on to methodology, and wrote most of the in-house tools we used to make the chip and integrated them with the commercial tools into a command line interface that tied everything together. It was a miracle that that chip got done, only a few months beyond the scheduled tape-out date, with the tiny team we had and given that AMD management was so hostile to our team.
Yeah, but everyone, and I mean everyone - has their price. And Apple can afford it if they thought there was the value.
People don't get it.
There is no such thing as a "bug free" complex circuit, let alone a cpu.
The only time it s real issue is if you have silent data corruption.
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Once you have been to school for engineering, the knowledge does not go away.
You still understand problem solving the same way.
I have multiple degrees in Electrical Engineering.
I've been out of school a long time.
I can still tutor 3rd semester physics, difference and differential equations, circuits classes and any digital logic design course.
Once an Engineer, always an Engineer.
Do you have a degree in engineering?
I have multiple.
You can argue, but the most difficult degree in college is an engineering degree because you take multiple classes from additional hard science areas.
For an ABET accredited school:
The program must have documented student outcomes that prepare graduates to attain the program educational objectives.
Student outcomes are outcomes (a) through (k) plus any additional outcomes that may be articulated by the program.
(a) an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering
(b) an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data
(c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability
(d) an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams
(e) an ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems
(f) an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility
(g) an ability to communicate effectively
(h) the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context
(i) a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning
(j) a knowledge of contemporary issues
(k) an ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice.
This typically means:
1 year of lab chemistry
1.5 years of physics
2 years of math Calculus I, II, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, additionally Probability and Stochastic Processes
Now you take your engineering courses.
This is undergraduate, not graduate level.
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And anyone who doesn't work for the same company long enough to earn enough seniority to have a decent number of vacation days is a sucker and a chump who will doubtless burn out completely in service to the great capitalist machine (in my opinion).
If you mean stock grants, then yeah, some people do that to diversify their investments, but for ESPP (employee stock purchase plan), nobody with a competent financial advisor does that unless he or she believes that the stock is likely to go down. If you hold ESPP stock for two years, you pay the capital gains tax rate on the difference between the purchase price and the selling price. If you sell immediately at the end of the plan period, you'll be taxed as if that were ordinary income.
I think most people fall into the middle and it is driven by more than one thing; the main ones being job satisfaction and mobility within a company.
I have been at companies where there was only a single engineering division, doing but one type of chip development.
That means when I got tired, I left. I have also been at companies with multiple engineering groups doing multiple chips. In that case I moved. Opportunity and mobility inside the company plays an important role.
I've also moved and gave up lots of vacation because someone threw enough cash at me where it just didn't matter.
I don't think that makes me a sucker.
Here again, driven by personal finance.
Some people don't care and just take the 15-20% gain. I know people that never held ESPP.
On the other hand I know people that held well after they left a company.
Talk to your financial adviser/planner.
As far as incentive options and RSUs.
Options only become money when you exercise. That means vesting doesn't have any impact on your finances and you can play around with when you exercise to limit tax exposure. What you don't do is exercise and hold. The tax risk is too great. You could end up on the wrong end of tax with no money to cover the taxes if the stock falls.
RSUs are regular income the day they vest. You can sell enough to cover the taxes and hold them because you can get capital gains if you hold and you have already paid the initial tax so its incremental on future gain.
I've been at multiple start up companies; some good some very bad.
Overall, print my options in a roll, 4"x4" squares, double ply. I might want to use them one day.
Less than 1 out of 10 start ups make it big.
Why did you get more than one engineering degree?
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It doesn't go away, but it does decay. You forget some of it and some of it becomes outdated. Remember, we aren't talking about someone with multiple degrees. We aren't talking about someone who has been working as an engineer. We are talking about someone who took some engineering classes nearly 30 years ago.
If you think everyone has their price over their principles or needs I think you have a somewhat dour view of the peoples worth. Seriously not everyone can be bought. If you have been working in a field at the top of your game for a long time I'm pretty sure financially you will be secure enough to make a more principled approach.
I have more than one degree because undergraduate and graduate degrees are more than one.
I understand he hasn't been an engineer, but the thought process and problem solving does not go away.
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Actually, I don't remember the exact requirements for an ABET accredited school.
I've been to several but the general qualifications for degrees, I don't remember.
I do know that chemistry (typically a year), physics (typically 1.5 years) and math (2 years of calculus and beyond) are standard degree requirements; in addition to engineering courses.
Engineering is most definitely not for the faint of heart.
He was most certainly an engineer. Industrial engineering is a discipline focused on engineering manufacturing process flows, etc. Not all engineering is designing devices - production flows, assembly lines, etc. also have to be engineered. And that is what he got his degree in. At RPI, when I was getting my EE degrees, the industrial engineering program essentially combined the core engineering classes with classes taught by the school of management.
The companies marketed 3-d wrong, it should of just been put in the televisions and if a third dimensional film was on they could with the press a button turn it on and than off...they saturated the public too much with that particular tech.
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They never left
All the apple people will be raptured soon.
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How come they were liked that?
Ok. Are you asking why management was hostile to our team? If so, that was slightly above my pay grade (i reported to the CTO and didn’t get to see a lot of went on at higher levels), but there was some sort of management shakeup happening and a power struggle between the Texas team and the California team. Back then California was where the headquarters was, and the california processor team was essentially the team from Nexgen (an acquired startup. In fact, when I first joined the company I worked only with the nexgen team in their separate headquarters in a different town than AMD). The Texas team had been traditionally responsible for microprocessors, but that didn’t work out so well - that’s why AMD had to buy Nexgen in order to get a competitive K6 chip. So the Texas team were these AMD “lifers” who didn’t much care for the California team, and the California team generally thought of themselves as the “saviors” who had to fix what the Texas team couldn’t accomplish. Then the CEO (sanders) retired, and was replaced by atiq raza, who was involved in some notorious legal problems. The guy who would eventually become CEO next was an engineer from the Texas team, who came up to California and told the whole team to quit if they didn’t like the way they were being treated (so many of them - i think like 40 in a 3 month period, but my memory could be wrong - did indeed quit). It was just a mess. When our chip did come out, I think it was maybe 3 months past when we initially planned to get it done (maybe 2 years instead of 20 months or something - again, long time ago and my memory is not great re: those details) and management told us the chip was a failure. I think history shows that Opteron/Athlon 64 were great successes that prevented the company from going the way of Cyrix, etc., but whatever. When new management came in they eventually forced out most of the small core team that did opteron/athlon 64, either by firing, removing responsibilities, or generally making things unpleasant so they would quit.
True story: I had been the head of “methodology” and EDA for those chips, but I had no computer science background other than self-taught. So they hired a new guy, a Belgian dude, to be my boss and take over after we finished the chip. First day I meet him, he calls me into his office. Actual conversation:
Him: “so, I hear that you are pretty indispensable around here.”
Me: “well, thanks. That’s good to hear. I do like to think I had a major role in getting the chip done.”
Him: “Well, the graveyards of Europe are full of the corpses of indispensable people.”
Gee, thanks, asshat.
I didn’t help matters, I admit. I wanted little to do with Texas, and so when it came time to decide how to build K8, I threw away texas’ entire design methodology and started from scratch. I think what we came up with was much better, but i certainly didn’t make any friends. Part of it was simply that I was young, and doing things someone else’s way is no fun. Most of us were young, in fact, so we all (on both teams) probably felt similarly. So, the TLDR: texas and California battling, management turnover, etc.
Wow, the CEO’s sound horrible particularly the Belgium, perhaps he forgot ww2 (Probably did not know of the Ardennes offensive) where his whole family would have been in graveyards or something worse.
It’s funny, I started naming my tools after Belgian-related war losses. I also created libraries for embedding into other tools written by other people, and i prefixed all my class names with “BS_.” He thought it stood for “********” but it really stood for “Belgium sucks.”
I was dopey back then.
Don’t be condescending. Why did you get more than one degree if a BS is suffice to teach you how to think like an engineer?