In September we commented here on the low evolution of the iPhone 14 Pro processor, the A16 Bionic compared to the previous generation.
At the time, we even questioned why the A16 and the A15 were not so different, even assuming that it could have been a conscious choice by Apple itself, perhaps wanting to keep ideas up its sleeve while the competition does not catch up.
However, according to behind-the-scenes information, the cause may have been the stampede important engineers from the company’s chip team, which reduced its development pace.
An article from the website The Information entitled “Inside Apple’s War for Chip Talent” (Inside the war for chip talent) comments on how the company is having difficulties holding on to its talented team responsible for creating the chips Apple Silicon.
And with the departure of several important names, the ability to propose evolutions is drastically reduced.
For more than a decade, Apple’s silicon engineering group has helped give Apple a competitive edge in smartphones and laptops.
Debuting in the A4 of the iPhone 4 and later developing its own processors for Macs, the company managed to stay independent of Intel and other chip manufacturers, managing to improve performance and battery consumption.
But in recent years this silicon engineering group has started to undocreating a big problem for Apple.
talent loss
Since 2019, some of the team’s engineers have been leaving the company to venture into their own startups, or work earning more at other companies.
Such was the case with lead CPU designer Gerard Williams III, who left to run his own startup, Bride.
Apple replaced Mike Filippo. However, he ended up clashing with other engineers and left in early 2022 to join Microsoft. Since then, Apple has not named a replacement.
And this inconstancy directly affected the development of the A16 Bionic.
New chip, old GPU
The engineers who stayed spent months developing what would be the new iPhone 14 Pro chip. And they even planned big changes.
The GPU of the new processor would have a great evolution, with several resources. One of them called Ray Tracingfor advanced three-dimensional graphics.
Everything was beautiful and wonderful, but time came to an end and the new team (without the talents of before) could not solve problems of excessive energy consumption and overheating. This meant that the iPhone 14 Pro would drain more battery and run hotter.
Deadline reached and management was forced to abort the evolutions and adopt a GPU engineering very similar to the previous year’s chip, the A15 Bionic.
And it is for this reason that many tests point to much smaller evolutions than in other years in the 2022 model.
Uncertain future
Now Apple’s mission is to reorganize its team of silicon engineers to bring the group together again, with more talented members.
The challenge is precisely to find these members and make sure they remain working for the company.
Apple invested heavily in the development of its own processors, with excellent results so far. Therefore, it cannot lose this space it has conquered, as it would be a very big setback.
The crowd remains for it to be quick in this reorganization, so that the next “iPhone 15 Pro” really brings evolutions that impress us.
