<i>> In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on.</i><p>Seems very shocking, a recent turn-over of about 100 engineers. I’m gonna assume these were all related to the CPU architecture teams.<p>Makes one wonder why these people left. Did they feel it was too hard to make progress with ARM? Was pay bad and didn’t Apple want to increase compensation? Perhaps a bad work/life balance?<p>What was interesting is that Apple was recently looking for a RISC V engineer in a job posting and who knows … perhaps looking for multiple. Would Apple be looking to change architecture to RISC V in the future? Maybe Apple is also worried by a possible acquisition of ARM by Nvidea of course.
This is Apple's "Zen+" style generation: a mild refresh when you don't need anything more (and that "more" needs more time to get ready).<p>> These are performance gains are generally paltry despite a huge increase from 11.8B transistors to 15B.<p>But all of those billions went into the Neural Engine. Look, Google is doing the same thing with Tensor SoC. Shoving more neural nets into the computational photography pipeline is priority number one for the smartphone giants because better camera systems are what likely drives a lot of new smartphone sales.
> We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing<p>I believe Apple has delayed new architecture for CPU simply because the actual one is powerful enough and they (correctly) want to take advantage of it in terms of large scale (and due to chip shortage/fabs sufferer).<p>The new iPhone 13 Pro is very interesting but one thing leave me “meh”: the weight! Again has increased from the already quite heavy 12 Pro:<p>iPhone 12 Pro: 189 grams / iPhone 13 Pro: 204 grams<p>Not much but I’m sure we will feel the difference, like from 12 to 12 pro.
I was so excited by the M1 despite being a linux user. I couldn't wait any longer to upgrade my old workstation, so I went for an AMD 5950X instead and couldn't he happier.<p>(Its extremely fast and powerful compared to an M1, at cost of greater power consumption of course.)
Does anyone else smell something funny here? The collection of top-lede articles all suggest a PR play by Rivos or its VC backers, e.g., anti-ARM, anti-Apple.
If the A14 was based on ARMv8.5A, is the A15 based on ARMv8.6A?<p>Presumably it's not ARMv9, since they didn't announce new silicon features.
@dang this should be merged with <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536704" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536704</a><p>(I'd argue that one links to the "source" article, based on the domain)