March 29, 2024

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Apple’s ‘unprecedented’ engineering shots reportedly spoiled plans for a more powerful iPhone 14 Pro chip

Apple’s ‘unprecedented’ engineering shots reportedly spoiled plans for a more powerful iPhone 14 Pro chip

the iPhone 14 Pro The A16 Bionic chip uses a similar architecture to the A15 model in version iPhone 13 Probut that was only Apple’s backup plan, according to Transfer From the information. The company wanted to add a next-generation ray-tracing-enabled GPU, but the silicon team discovered critical design errors late in development. Allegedly he had to cancel his plans and opt for the A16 we got.

The failed plans can reportedly be attributed to Apple’s silicon engineers being “too ambitious with the addition of new features”. Silicon was supposed to support the planned 2022 Ray tracing, the technology that makes light in video games behave the same as it does in real life. Software simulations suggested it was possible, and the company moved ahead with prototyping. But the test devices drew more power than engineers expected, which can hurt battery life and cause the device to overheat.

Because Apple caught the bug late in development, it had to scrap plans for this generation and opt for the A16 that shipped this fall instead. (In Apple’s September keynote, instead of exaggerating the new chip’s massive gains, as is usually the case, it only briefly mentioned that the GPU has 50% more memory bandwidth.) The report’s sources described this error as “unprecedented in the group’s history.”

the informationThe report connects this incident to the larger conflict within the Apple Silicon team. Details highly effective and demanding leadership under Senior Vice President, Device Technologies, Johnny Srugi. He runs the group “like a well-oiled machine,” but it too suffers from the limitations of Moore’s Law and an outflow of talent to competing startups and chipmakers. It allegedly lost most of the talent to Nuvia, which was founded by former Apple chip designer Gerard Williams III — a beloved leader among Apple’s silicon engineers. (Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021.) The designer who replaced Williams, Mike Filippo, then “battled with the engineers” before leaving to join Microsoft. Apple has not yet replaced it. In addition, the company has reportedly tried to curb the talent drain by showing presentations to engineers that highlight the dangers of working in chip-based startups, warning that most of them fail.

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