Apple’s top brass explains how they plan silicon development

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Following the MacBook Pro launch in October ’21, Wired got the chance to speak with senior worldwide marketing VP Greg Joswiak, senior hardware engineering VP John Ternus, and senior hardware technology VP Johny Srouji. The entire interview is worth reading, but, for the record, what follows are some of the details of what was said that may come in useful later on.

The context thing

In its lede, Wired made a few assertions. It is not clear if these come from the company or from the author:

The Apple M-series notebooks fit within the company’s 14-year strategy, a huge initiative in which it chose to design, develop and deliver its own processors.

The company is replacing processors from other vendors as part of this.

Johny Srouji was once in the running to become Intel’s CEO. In 2008 he joined Apple to lead Apple’s work to make its own silicon. “The effort has been so well executed that I believe Srouji is secretly succeeding Jony Ive as the pivotal creative wizard whipping up the secret sauce in Apple’s offerings,” the report says.

Senior hardware technology VP Johny Srouji seems to have a magic touch

Here’s the gist of what Srouji says:

Designing the processor, hardware, software, industrial design gives his teams the chance to deliver truly optimized silicon.

The MacBook Pro was envisioned “several years ago”.

The only barriers are the laws of physics – in the absence of such profound restriction the company works to simply build the road map there. Some things may take more time.

Apple made a conscious decision to use an architecture that could scale for multiple needs.

The silicon development team has made a conscious effort to design proprietary silicon for everything, from the display engine to the CPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQvM-mDkK_s

Here’s the gist of what Ternus tells us:

Apple has found a way to enable its teams (hardware, silicon, whatever) to work together from day one. That means as problems are found in one section of the process, solutions can be identified, rather than forcing avoidable compromise.

Joswiak keeps it simple: ‘Buy a Mac’

Joswiak offers a little advice to other hardware companies who may hope to develop their own silicon. (Google’s Pixel 6 uses its own Tensor processor.)

His advice is pretty simple.

“Buy a Mac”.

Read the whole thing here.

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