Apple’s A-series of SoCs continue to lead the smartphone market with unrivaled performance, but the yearly gap in those leaps has reduced. That is because the technology giant has witnessed a massive brain drain, with engineers and executives of the firm’s chip division leaving in search of better opportunities and an improved working environment. This makes the current situation extremely difficult for Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, Johnny Srouji, according to one report.
Apple has attempted to spike confidence in chip engineers that the firms hiring former employees will not remain in business
An earlier report said that an earlier A16 Bionic iteration had ray tracing support but consumed too much power and could not be used in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. This might be why there is evidence that Apple’s latest top-tier iPhone SoC uses a GPU architecture similar to the A15 Bionic, with a previous die shot comparison showing fewer differences between the two custom silicon.
The Information states that Apple’s Srouji will continue to face problems as more chip engineers leave for greener pastures, which includes the likes of CPU designer Gerard Williams III, who left to start Nuvia in 2019 and was acquired by Qualcomm, which later introduced Oryon. Though he was later replaced by Mike Filippo, he resigned too earlier this year to go work for Microsoft, and quite surprisingly, Apple has yet to name his replacement.
To prevent more engineers from leaving the company, Apple has made presentations in an attempt to convince its employees that a career at the California-based giant is more rewarding and stable, as there is an immense amount of risk attached to startups that focus on chip development. Given that many industry experts and economy watchers have predicted a severe economic downturn, many of these engineers will likely prefer working at Apple.
However, it does not change the fact that now, companies like Qualcomm can gain an edge against Apple’s A-series of chipsets. According to one multi-core benchmark leak, the newly announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 manages to close that performance gap, and if the A17 Bionic launching next year disappoints in performance metrics, perhaps Qualcomm’s or MediaTek’s flagship silicon will overtake Apple’s next-generation offering for the first time in 2023.
News Source: The Information
