Posts Tagged: Engineering

Apple’s ‘unprecedented’ engineering snafu reportedly spoiled plans for more powerful iPhone 14 Pro chip

The iPhone 14 Pro’s A16 Bionic chip uses a similar architecture to the A15 in the iPhone 13 Pro, but that was only Apple’s fallback plan, according to a report from The Information. The company wanted to add a next-generation GPU that supports ray tracing, but the silicon team discovered crucial design mistakes late in development. It allegedly had to scrap its plans and opt for the A16 we got.

The botched plans can reportedly be traced back to Apple’s silicon engineers being “too ambitious with adding new features.” The planned 2022 silicon would have supported ray tracing, the technique that makes light in video games behave as it does in real life. Software simulations had suggested it was feasible, and the company moved forward with prototyping. But test hardware drew more power than the engineers had expected, which would have hurt battery life and overheated the device.

Because Apple caught the mistakes late in development, it had to scrap the plans for this generation and opt instead for the A16 that shipped this fall. (In Apple’s September keynote, rather than puffing up the new chip’s monumental gains, as it typically does, it only briefly mentioned that the GPU had 50 percent more memory bandwidth.) The report’s sources described the screwup as “unprecedented in the group’s history.”

The Information‘s report connects this incident to bigger-picture struggles within the Apple Silicon team. It details the effective but highly demanding leadership under the senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji. He runs the group “like a well-oiled machine,” but it’s also struggled with the limits of Moore’s law and a talent exodus to startups and rival chip makers. It allegedly lost the most talent to Nuvia, founded by former Apple chip designer Gerard Williams III — a well-liked leader among Apple’s silicon engineers. (Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021.) The designer who replaced Williams, Mike Filippo, then “clashed with engineers” before leaving to join Microsoft. Apple hasn’t yet replaced him. Additionally, the company reportedly tried to limit the talent exodus by showing presentations to engineers highlighting the riskiness of working for chip startups, warning that most fail.

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Udacity’s ‘flying car’ engineering course starts next month

Flying cars have always been a goalpost of the future, but last year companies like Toyota, Airbus, DeLorean and Volvo's parent company invested in or announced plans to get their own units flying soon. If you wanted to get in on the ground floor of…
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Samsung just won 36 CES 2018 innovation awards for design and engineering

Samsung makes a lot more than just Galaxy phones and 36 of its latest products are CES 2018 award winners. The awards are for outstanding design and engineering, and the program has 28 product categories. Samsung’s awards include two “Best of Innovation” and span categories such as “Virtual and Augmented Reality,” “Wearable Technologies,” “Video Displays,” […]

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One small sip for man: Engineering students aim to brew first beer on moon

Conducted as part of TeamIndus’ Lab2Moon competition, a group of engineering students at UC San Diego hopes to become the first to brew a batch of beer on the moon. The project also intends to study yeast’s reaction in space.

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