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Anyone else a bit skeptical about Apple silicon future?
- Thread starter dapa0s
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iPhone 13 versus iPhone 12 performance comparisons missing - 9to5Mac
There was one interesting thing missing from yesterday's keynote: There was no iPhone 13 versus iPhone 12 performance comparison ...
9to5mac.com
If you want to feel skeptical, this article does a good job getting you to. It discusses how Apple has had "brain drain" recently in their chip designing team and how the A15 appears to have no significant performance improvements over the A14.
I’m a graphic designer, I work with pretty shapes and colors. They’re mostly nurses.
They probably deal with bruises and swelling a fair bit then. They come in all sorts of colours
The nurses are pretty shapes and colors?
It does sound disconcerting. I wonder how many of those 100 engineers were from the Apple Silicon design team. It seems to me keeping their team top-notch is essential to stay ahead.
I wonder if Apple will keep MacOS running on Intel in the lab...
I'd use COVID as the reason not to show up. Odds of them being in a working environment with a high viral load is higher than you will ever be.
I'd wait for benchmarks before believing clickbait articles.iPhone 13 versus iPhone 12 performance comparisons missing - 9to5Mac
There was one interesting thing missing from yesterday's keynote: There was no iPhone 13 versus iPhone 12 performance comparison ...
If you want to feel skeptical, this article does a good job getting you to. It discusses how Apple has had "brain drain" recently in their chip designing team and how the A15 appears to have no significant performance improvements over the A14.
The purported brain drain would only manifest itself years after and there isnt a shortage of engineering talent. You just need to give a better offer and working condition.
See these articles from 2011 and 2013
Just go to linkedin and search for CPU designers, VLSI designers, SoC engineers, etc. and you will see that there is no braindrain. People leave jobs in Silicon Valley all the time. No one person is going to make a difference. Only in the rare situation where the majority of a team on a given project quits at once (I saw that happen once) is there an impact.
Thank you for agreeing with me that the article's just meant to worry worrywarts.
Foretunately for people like me my carrrier will receive their shipment of iPhones by December so whatever flaws will be highlighted between now and then.
You know, now that we've mentioned him before, every time there was a big interview with Jim Keller or Raja Koduri or such, I always thought "I acknowledge that you're probably very talented to get all this acclaim, but how much can one single person really matter in designing something as big as a CPU/SoC/GPU"
Though at the same time I suppose there's also a factor of the management power of people who're good at assembling that great team in the first place. Hiring the right people and whatnot.
Any reason the majority of a team left all at once in that story you allude to?
I've seen whole teams leave (I was part of one once) and it's usually out of loyalty to a manager that has demonstrated great loyalty and management to employees in the past.
Even-numbered chips (K6, K8, etc.) were being done in California, and odd in Texas, and the teams didn’t get along. I was working on K6 revisions, though early work on the first version of K8 was happening. Anyway, people were getting cranky about being stuck on K6, or were tired of the industry, and a few key people left. Many of us had also come into AMD via their acquisition of Nexgen, or had started work at “AMD” with the Nexgen team in Milpitas post-acquisition. They had sort of saved the company, because “K5” was terrible, and the original K6, done by Texas (which was replaced by the renamed Nx586 from nexgen) was also not good. But now they had achieved some success on K6 and wanted to move onto the next thing, but they weren’t able to for various reasons, felt disrespected by AMD, didn’t like the move from Milpitas into AMD’s Sunnyvale’s headquarters, etc.
Anyway, Dirk Meyer, then in charge of the Texas team, flew to california, supposedly to cheer us up. Instead, at a group meeting, he said something like “If you can’t hack it here, leave.”
A *ton* of people took him up on his offer.
That’s why we ended up with something like 15 designers, plus a few verification and layout engineers, and we had to start K8 over from scratch, and make it something achievable by a small number of us, each wearing lots of hats. And that, boys and girls, is how x86-64 née AMD64 was born.
Story is false. There are not 100 cpu designers who left apple for Nuvia. That’s just silly.
Interesting. Good to know @cmaier. As an aside and being sincere, what would I look for in that article to tell me that it is false? I would never want to post incorrect information.
Like I‘ve said - go to linkedin and you can find all the CPU engineers that still work at Apple and have for years. Nuvia was a tiny company, around a year old when it was acquired - no way it even had 100 employees.
The term for that is 'seagull management'. Fly in, sh** on people and fly out again.
That’s great
. Never heard that before.I think that guy actually became CEO for a bit. Must have been the terrific job he did on K5.
Peeking and poking was really for people typing in listings from magazines or manipulating memory mapped hardware. For actual code was much simpler just to use a macro assembler and since those 6502 CPUs were so slow, the only way to get decent performance.
There are hobbyists still writing games in 6502 assembler just for fun.
the biggest base for Apple developers come from iOS and iPadOS developers, not AppKit. Using Catalyst, it isn't a huge leap to create a macOS app if a developer already has an iPadOS app.
Starting with Windows 11, MS has implemented their own version of Rosetta that allows x86 Windows apps to run much smoother on Windows on ARM.
What makes you think x86 binary translation is new for Windows 11? The 32-bit version has been in Windows on Arm for Windows 10 since Microsoft released their first Surface X at least. Microsoft also had 64-bit translation on Windows 10 betas but moved the release to Windows 11.