Do you mean the notch that other companies have replicated without the facial recognition software? Maybe they should've just put a hole in the screen like Samsung.
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Key iOS Chip Architect Gerard Williams III Departs Apple
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Time to bring in Gerard Williams IV.
Now that has to be a brilliant mind. The rapid evolution of their custom chips has been astonishing. What a legacy to begin where he did and leave these energy efficient and cool running chips at roughly laptop performance.
My experience with Apple services has not been good. They have always been lacking, slow, confusing, or all the above.
No. Every CPU - and I mean *every* CPU - has bugs. Nobody cares.
I'm starting to think something's not right about Apple. This thing of focusing more on services than on hardware makes me believe that it is a way to avoid the increasingly difficult to keep up with the Chinese smartphones competition.
Total drama queens on the outside looking in. MacRumors forums are an echo chamber of FUD grown in a vacuum of context and historical competence. I come here for a laugh.
anyone who works at the same company their whole adult life is a loser with no ambition (in my opinion)
Stop lying. You were called out on this before and you’re back posting the same BS again?
You literally copy pasted issues with the scheduler on the Exynos 9810 (that Anandtech discovered) and tried to substitute A12 for 9810 and thinking nobody would notice.
[doublepost=1553970101][/doublepost]Well they said that when Bob Mansfield left, and they have been pretty much at a stand still, Design is no good without the people to produce it
Personally, I think iOS took a nose dive after Scott Forstall left. I understand that he was the main guy behind iOS being what it is. He may have been difficult to manage, but Jobs understood his value and contribution and made it work. Every year, progress was made, until he left. Then it was flat this, and tiny feature that.
If this CPU architect guy is anything like that, Apple could lose its hardware advantage. As it is, Snapdragon SoCs have almost caught up.
Things aren't looking up for Apple at the moment.
If this CPU architect guy is anything like that, Apple could lose its hardware advantage. As it is, Snapdragon SoCs have almost caught up.
Things aren't looking up for Apple at the moment.
What are you talking about? The silicon development team has been on fire since Mansfield left.
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I have no idea why this guy keeps posting this garbage.
Well Intel feels a lot safer on Macs not moving to A series chips now.
No they don’t.
Again, his job isn’t what you think it was, and is not what the press is making it out to be. Architects are not in charge of designing the chips.
Yeah, totally.
Apple probably had one guy creating their entire A-Series chips, start to finish.
/s
Why? If Apple was going this way you can bet they would have already done a significant amount of the work involved. They might even have actual processors running in their labs right now. You don't just get up one morning and decide to make a desktop CPU and start cranking them out a few months later.
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Based on your history in the industry, I'm curious if you could provide a list of the people involved from top to bottom and what their responsibilities would be. Also how many people are at each stage. Apple obviously has 100's of engineers working on processors, so I'm really curious how their tasks would be broken down.
Right? Lol.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcr...search-chief-john-giannandrea-steps-down/amp/
There’s a link to an article a year ago, when Google lost their damn chief of AI & Search (arguably, the highest position at Google, below CEO), to Apple.
Yeah... notice the extreme LACK of paranoia in the article, claiming that Google would now fail.
It boggles the mind why people treat the same information so differently when the characters only difference is working for a different tech company.
The main page articles seem to attract the worst from people. The iPhone forums can get pretty toxic. Beyond that, things really start to mellow out. For example, when the spring bands were announced for the watch, the thread from the main page was almost entirely negative. Lots of nonsense about "maybe they can get back to designing hardware" and Apple can't innovate. The usual crap. But the talk in the Apple Watch Accessories forums were full of excitement and joy and people posting photos of their new bands.
Reasonable conversations can be had here with knowledgeable people. I'm mostly here to learn (the rest is for laughs to be honest). This thread for example, I'm trying to actually educate myself on what this guy does, what his loss could mean, etc. I'm slowly getting the important pieces, but it's hard because some people use every thread to attack Apple rather than discussing the story. It's too bad more isn't done on the moderation side, but it is what it is.
I don't think that is connected to anything. He stayed at Apple for almost a decade. That's pretty long for industry standards. I haven't stayed at a place longer than 4 years in my career. Sometimes you just want a change.
I don’t know exactly how Apple has it broken down, but since many of the people there are from AMD or from Intrinsity (which was EVSX which was Exponential’s Texas office), and since I worked at AMD and Exponential, I can guess that it’s staffed more like those places and less like Intel.
Typically you have an architecture team that is responsible for both the high level architecture (how many cores? What kind of external buses? How much cache? How many pipelines? What should the pipelines do?) and for creating a model (typically in a C-based language, or in Verilog) that simulates the design at a high level. They also do performance analysis, etc. (Hint: every proposed change always makes 10% difference).
I’ve been on teams where there is NO single person in charge of that (e.g. Athlon 64) and teams where there are 1 or 2. The full team usually has maybe 10 or 12 people, working on multiple chips at a time.
Then you have a global design team. This team is often responsible for global floorplanning (how big should the blocks be? Where should they be? Where do the on-chip buses go? What should the cell library look like? What do the power rails look like? How big is the chip? What’s the power budget? Etc.).
I’ve done a little of the first job, and a lot of the second job. Global design usually involves a handful of people. Usually these people are also working on other things, too.
They you have physical design. These people translate the architects vision for the various blocks into the actual circuits. We always did this almost entirely by hand (i.e. we didn’t use synopsys design compiler). I wrote many tools to make this easier to do. It involves deciding what logic cells to use to implement the logic, what sizes they should be, and where they should be located. We also have to get the wires in the right places to connect them, add buffers and repeaters, make sure we meet the circuit timing and power requirements, etc. I did a ton of this. In a given core there would be maybe 10 “top level blocks” (e.g. integer-execution, instructions decode, instruction fetch, floating point execute, load/store, etc). Typically one person is in charge of each (I’ve been that person a lot). Within each top level block there are typically multiple sub-blocks. For example. Integer execution may have a multiplier block, adder/shifter blocks, register file block, etc. Each block may have a person in charge. So the entire physical design team is often two dozen or three dozen people.
Then you have people responsible for actually massaging the chip into its final form, layout the polygons in standard cells etc. That could be a half dozen or dozen people.
You also have design verification people who make sure that the chip is logically correct, etc. Another dozen, say.
Again, people are often working on multiple chips at a time, so the numbers can be misleading.
Ahhhh, the old “not properly stress tested” amateur arm chair guide to how to run the world’s most valuable company.
If only Apple had you to guide them right into the ground.