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"The man behind the Apple chip."
The source of this article is "Aifaner" (ID: ifanr), which is reprinted by Tencent Venture with permission.
Text/Du Yuanyuan
From the determination to make chips in 2007, Apple Silicon has blossomed everywhere, covering almost all of Apple's product lines such as iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
The most important thing is that Apple is not a chip design company in the traditional sense, and the A series and M series chips they are working on are just to make the product different.
▲ Apple M1 chip "Tiantuan".
And Apple chips are not sold, only exist in Apple products. Under the framework of the rules, it is not easy to achieve such an achievement.
CCS Insight analyst Wayne Lam even predicted that Apple's chip division will become the world's top twelve chip companies by revenue, reaching this achievement, and Apple has only spent 15 years.
▲ Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware at Apple. Image courtesy of Apple
With the strong performance of the chip, the description of performance at Apple's conference was also transferred from Tim Cook to Johny Srouji.
He doesn't like to read the script in the scenes set up in Apple Park, preferring to record live at Apple's chip research and development center in Israel.
▲ Johny Srouji in a matrix. Image credit: Bloomberg
There, rows of custom Mac minis are on the table to test prototype chips under a variety of temperature and pressure conditions, and there are countless bare boards and chips in the aisles.
"It's like a matrix here," srouji once made in an interview.
▲ Herzliya Apple R&D Center.
In 2012, Apple acquired Anobit, an Israeli manufacturer of flash drive controllers, and subsequently established a new Apple research and development center in Herzliya, Israel.
Together with the previously existing Research and Development Center in Haifa, the Apple Silicon team currently has more than 1,000 employees, with team members in two research and development centers in Israel, Cupertino in the United States and around the world.
1
start
In 2008, Jobs brought together two legendary chip designers, Sribalan Santhanam and Jim Keller, and Johny Srouji, who worked at Intel and IBM, through the acquisition of P.A. Semi and Intrinsty, who later became the soul of Apple's core team.
After the team was integrated, coupled with the previous investment in buying a high-level architecture license from ARM, in less than two years, the A4 chip successfully appeared, and with the iPhone 4, it subverted the smartphone industry.
However, at that time, the A4 chip was covered by Jobs's original "retina" screen light, and the A4 core architecture was similar to the Samsung processor, which did not attract the attention of the industry.
▲ iPhone 4 disassembly. Image courtesy of gdgt
The A4 chip is also the first work of Johny Srouji's team, and for Apple, it is the first to grasp the autonomy of the iPhone SoC.
Johny Srouji recalls that the chip design was like planning an intricate city, but the city was only the size of a fingertip.
"If you get a transistor wrong, it will make the whole chip unable to work efficiently, and the whole device will be unresponsive." It (the chip) is not software, it can be upgraded and buggies remedied by OTA, and when it leaves the factory, it must be guaranteed that every transistor is running correctly."
Perhaps it is precisely because of this awe that the A4 chip was just designed and produced step by step, and finally appeared in the iPhone 4 on time.
Looking at the A series and M series chips, the A4 is the beginning of Apple's core making, and it is also the beginning of Johny Srouji's era of creating ARM.
2
subversion
I thought that apple A's chip would continue to be in order and maintain a "common progress" with major counterparts. In 2013, Johny Srouji embarked on a journey to "disrupt" the old industry.
Ryan Smith, then editor-in-chief of AnandTech's technology website, shouted that "A7 really subverted the world," and this "world" refers to the smartphone SoC under the control of traditional chip manufacturers.
The A7 chip uses the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, and the iPhone 5s became the first smartphone to be equipped with a 64-bit processor.
At the same time, with the blessing of A7, iPhone 5s has a Touch ID fingerprint recognition function, which has also promoted biometrics to become the standard in the smartphone industry.
The A7 accelerated the speed of the transformation of the mobile phone SoC to 64bit, and Qualcomm was also affected by this, abandoning the 32bit chip project being developed and pouring its resources into 64bit to catch up with Apple.
▲ Apple A7. Image credit: iMore
When he saw competitors make hasty decisions in the face of the A7's 64-bit chip, Srouji still can't hide the smile on his lips.
A7 can be said to be a milestone in the history of Apple's core manufacturing. After four generations, A-series chips have begun to lead the industry.
3
milestone
The next milestone can be said to be both the A-series chip itself and Johny Srouji himself.
Very early on, Apple began to use a different chip on the iPad than the iPhone, or a magic version. You can say that Apple wants to make the tablet bigger and stronger, but at that time, the tablet was just a big-screen entertainment device for many people.
With the advent of the iPhone 6 Plus, the iPhone screen size suddenly broke through to 5.5 inches, followed by a record sales of 220 million units.
But behind the gloss, the iPad is a little confused, sandwiched between the iPhone and the Mac, and the positioning is somewhat unclear. So Apple plans to change the iPad, add a Pro suffix to him, expand the screen to 12.9 inches, and plan to release it in the spring of 2015.
▲ iPad Pro 12.9. Image credit: iMore
However, the production of the iPad Pro was not smooth, the hardware, software and design were not ready, and finally Tim Cook decided to postpone it until the fall, that is, to release with the iPhone 6s series.
This gives the marketing, design, software, etc. teams more time, but for the Srouji team, the time is more pressing.
To know that the Original SoC for the iPad Pro is the same A8X (an old processor from a year ago) of the iPad Air 2, if the time is delayed until September, it needs to be equipped with the latest A9X, which means that the A9 and A9X need to be released at the same time.
Crucially, in order to highlight the Pro features, the A9X also has to be sufficiently differentiated from the A9 in terms of performance.
In the end, the Srouji team gladly accepted the challenge and spent half a year mass production of the A9X, and the iPad Pro 12.9 also appeared on time.
In December of the same year, Johny Srouji was promoted to management and became senior vice president in charge of Apple's hardware, receiving an additional 90,000 shares in stock.
▲ iPad Pro 12.9 with M1 chip
Now, the importance of the iPad Pro product line is self-evident, so that Apple shouted out the "your next computer must be a computer" rhetoric, the fundamental reason is because the iPad Pro has a powerful enough chip behind it.
Formerly a magic version of the A series, it has now become a "desktop" M series.
4
Turning
In 2017, Srouji, who became Apple's vice president, encountered the next milestone in Apple's core-making history, "kicking Intel out."
Mike Demler, an analyst focused on the semiconductor industry for more than 50 years, has said of the choice Apple made that "they were a little hesitant to kick Intel out of the game at first," but "it has made the Mac a more dominant platform."
In the same year, Apple executives found some senior technology media to hold a roundtable communication meeting, the purpose is to apologize for the poor performance of the Mac Pro, and said that Apple is focusing on reversing the decline of the Mac Pro.
John Gruber, who attended the Mac Pro Lives conference that year, wrote a summary of "facts speak louder than words" on his blog.
▲ Image courtesy of Unbox Therapy
The point of contention about the Mac Pro is that the Intel processor is not enough to undertake the Mac Pro product, and the MacBook and Mac mini in the same period have been complained about or even complained about because of the low energy efficiency ratio.
Before making up its mind, there was also a fierce debate within Apple, and one side always believed that traditional PC manufacturers would not take on the design and development of processors alone, which was a huge risk.
And what Apple needs is a series of chips that can be applied to all the different positioning Macs from Mac mini to Mac Pro, which is very difficult.
Johny Srouji put forward two thoughts, one is if the core is successful, can we provide a better product than the Intel Mac experience?
Another is that this project, like the A-series chips, requires year after year of iteration, and even more chip versions are available to accommodate more products, which is a huge project.
In the end, Johny Srouji and his team rose to the challenge, as he said, "Difficulty is a good thing, easy is actually a waste of time."
For these two thoughts, when developing the M chip Mac, Johny Srouji constantly wandered around the design team, the software team and the Pro Workflow team formed by Apple, and its chip team worked more and more closely with other teams.
Moreover, Apple Silicon chip architects have adopted a scalable architecture to cope with different positioning of Mac products, adding the SoC concept, encapsulating memory with the CPU and GPU to solve the delay of data transmission.
With the success of the M1 series of chips, Apple has also carried out a drastic reform of the Mac product line, abolishing the theory of thinness and lightness, and returning to the way the Mac should be.
The Mac also managed to steal the limelight from the iPhone, causing us to shout "Apple is back to a computer company."
5
change
The Apple Silicon team has gradually become the center of all of Apple's product development, and the head of The Johny Srouji has become more and more influential, and even seen as a candidate to succeed Tim Cook.
To improve efficiency, Johny Srouji designed a new testing process, installing cameras throughout the lab to facilitate remote inspection by engineers around the world, contrary to Apple's confidentiality charter.
▲ Stunning UltraFusion architecture.
In addition, in order to maintain the leading position of A series chips and M series chips, Apple has increased its investment in research and development every year since 2015, and is expected to exceed $20 billion by 2021.
As for how the Apple Silicon team spends and why it should be invested, Tim Cook, as CEO, never asks, everything is arranged by Johny Srouji.
In the past, the protagonists of Apple's conferences have often been Jony Ive and his design team, or the software team that brings new features to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
They will always have many angles to show off, such as elegant fuselage design, ecological integration that breaks down hardware barriers. But since the birth of M1, the protagonist at Apple's conference has gradually been taken over by Apple Silicon, and we are more willing to see how strong the M chip has a strong energy efficiency ratio, and we are also willing to see how the products equipped with M chips will have a new form.
And all this will be Johny Srouji standing in the Apple chip lab that thinks of itself as a "matrix", slowly telling us.
I've probably heard a lot of stories about Apple's core, but I still like to revisit johny Srouji, the man behind Apple chips.
END
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