I was hoping Timmy goes next.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Key iOS Chip Architect Gerard Williams III Departs Apple
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Not all. A few in the past have been reported to have bankrupted themselves by taking a gamble. Others have enough cash on hand to pay the taxes without selling.
There’s no way? Athlon 64 was done entirely by hand. As was every other chip I ever worked on at AMD, Sun and Exponential. We placed every cell by hand, and synthesized all logic by hand.
[doublepost=1553985890][/doublepost]
True. Not all. Most. The smart ones.
Nah. I suspect Cook has at *least* five more years with Apple before any major changes in the CEO position sector. He is doing too good of a job within Apples infrastructure to oust him of his position.
This is starting to look like a company in free-fall.
They are even faltering in the design department. What products have truly been redesigned after Steve Job's death? The iPhone with a disgusting notch? The Macbooks with the worst keyboard in the entire industry? What else? I guess the iPad pro, which look pretty good but come bent and warped out of the box.
They are even faltering in the design department. What products have truly been redesigned after Steve Job's death? The iPhone with a disgusting notch? The Macbooks with the worst keyboard in the entire industry? What else? I guess the iPad pro, which look pretty good but come bent and warped out of the box.
Last edited:
How people can turn this into an anti-Apple diatribe is beyond rational thought.
I cam here to inquire when Gerard Williams III BEGAN working for Apple - what year - something that I didn't see in the article.
And I don't do Linkedin so I won't have to remove their cookies afterwards.
I cam here to inquire when Gerard Williams III BEGAN working for Apple - what year - something that I didn't see in the article.
And I don't do Linkedin so I won't have to remove their cookies afterwards.
... or:
Tim Cook is not an engineer. He is not a designer. Not a computer scientist.
He was CFO if I recall correctly and in earlier days streamlined production. He's a money man (a.k.a beancounter). The new "products" reflect this very well.
"If the only tool you got is a hammer, anything looks like a nail". Apple now - finally - introduced products the boss is familiar with.
Apple Watch. AirPod. IPad Pro.
[doublepost=1553989422][/doublepost]
Yes he is. Has a degree and everything.
Unlike, say, Steve Jobs.
Ok, I see. I realised he got an MBA and ignored his BS. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering) knows, quote: "..an inter-disciplinary profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy and materials". End quote
So you're right, he is an engineer. But not a product guy... actually this profile perfectly matches the said above
Losing an employee and cancelling an accessory is hardly the end of the world, but you’d never know it by the posts on the MR forums
The credit card business alone more than makes up for those two events; it’ll be a cash cow and will accelerate the growth of Apple Pay. It’ll also help drive revenue growth from the products segment, and makes the Apple ecosystem stronger and stickier.
PS. Congrats on another content- and analysis-free Apple-hate post. Your body of work is consistent and impressive.
Losing an employee and cancelling an accessory is hardly the end of the world, but you’d never know it by the posts on the MR forums
The credit card business alone more than makes up for those two events; it’ll be a cash cow and will accelerate the growth of Apple Pay. It’ll also help drive revenue growth from the products segment, and makes the Apple ecosystem stronger and stickier.
PS. Congrats on another content- and analysis-free Apple-hate post. Your body of work is consistent and impressive.
As is your defense of Apple.
Astute analysis of Apple’s week; extremely cogent counter argument to my analysis
Apple Arcade is another winner. No IAP and what looks to be some rather compelling games. Subsidizing indies is especially important and truly meaningful. Excellent strategic move that is likely to pay great dividends in the future.
PS. Again, congrats! “I know you are but what am I” is about as content-free and valueless a post as you can get. Quite impressive, and a worthy addition to your canon of work here.
in 2000 that might have been reasonable. sometime in the late 90s, synopsys couldn't even infer a flop from an always block. we had a guy come from transmeta in 2001 that instantiated every single flop in his code by hand and by that time that was already a headscratcher.
time has passed us by man...
cell placement by hand, either from design compiler or from hand-synthesized logic, is something i'm sure even apple is still doing. but for regular structures nowadays i'm sure you'd write a script to tile everything out and then tweak it by hand.
Never CFO, though he was previously COO. He’s an operations guy, not a finance guy or an accountant.
As you note in a subsequent post, his degree in industrial engineering—"..an inter-disciplinary profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy and materials"—is part of what makes him such an effective CEO.
I was doing this well past 2000. And “by hand” doesn’t mean without scripts. It means without design compiler. We used a placement language I designed that was similar to xcode’s constraints language. For regular structures you could lay out columns or rows, with arbitrary “skips”, or snapped to grids or anchors. For other cells you could say things like:
Inv012.x = max(bus12[].right, 1000)
Similarly, when hand “compiling” we had a language that was a superset of structural verilog that let you more easily handle buses and things. We found that the time spent up front doing it was well worth it, so we didn’t have to debug randomly named instances that meant nothing to us later on. We also had tools (some written by me) to automatically size cells once placed; I reverse engineered Primetime’s algorithm for static timing [pretty simple moments-poles thing], then estimated RC load based on distances and routing congestion to guess metal layers, etc. We even had a graphical tool that a friend of mine and I wrote that let us drag cells around the screen and dynamic see the new timing for critical paths.
These were very big chips. We tested against commercial vendors, had them have their AEs run their tools, and found we always beat them by around 20% in power/delay./
I’m guessing it’s Apple forcing their employees to use the pesky Butterfly keyboards that is driving them all elsewhere. ;-)
Whoa, such astonishing heft. Next juvenile burn from Mr. AppleScruff1: "I'm rubber, you're glue..."