CNBC Business News shared the first video from inside Apple’s chip HQ laboratory in Silicon Valley. Katie Tarasov from the news organization visited the labs and spoke with several senior Apple hardware executives. She heard about the reasons behind the transition to bring processor development in-house, major achievements over the years, and the size and scale of the current operation.
The video tour starts in what is described as “an undefined room full of a few hundred vibrating machines.” Here, technicians in lab coats are seen carefully pondering over components and PCBs, presumably taken from some of the hundreds of busy machines assembled on racks.
Apple only started working on its processors around 2008. At that time, there were only 40 or 50 engineers, according to CNBC. However, this quickly grew with the introduction of the first Apple-branded processor, the 2010-era A4, used in the iPhone 4 and the original iPad. The team grew through larger ambitions and acquisitions, and in 2023 there are “thousands of engineers working in labs worldwide,” including those in the US, Israel, Germany, Austria, the UK, and Japan.
John Ternus, a 22-year veteran of Apple and the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, said that the development and implementation of Apple Silicon is “one of the most, if not the deepest, changes at Apple” in the past 20 years.
To say that Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering was pleased with the progress of the Apple silicon design team seems like an understatement. “It was almost like the laws of physics had changed,” said Ternus about the breakthroughs offered by Apple Silicon. “Suddenly, we were able to build an incredibly thin and light MacBook Air, fanless, with 18 hours of battery life and with performance that is superior to the MacBook Pro we just launched.” He also stated that “practically every Mac is capable of running Triple-A [games] titles.”
Tarasov from CNBC also spoke with Apple Silicon chief, Johny Srouji. He emphasized that Apple Silicon is made only for Apple products, and therefore, the company can “build chips with accuracy and precision that are targeted for those products, and only for those products.” The process offers great optimization and scalability options.
It was interesting to hear from the head of Apple Silicon that the biggest changes recently have been in strengthening the GPU part of the SoC. Srouji highlighted the addition of PC-like features, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading acceleration.
Of course, just like the CPU and GPU, Apple has been developing its NPU for on-device AI acceleration. However, CNBC was unable to obtain information from any Apple executive regarding the rumored Apple GPT. When asked about the possibility of falling behind in AI, Srouji reportedly said, “I don’t believe we are.”
We still do not expect any Apple SoC to include a modem soon. “We care about the cellular and we have teams that enable that,” Srouji said. Apple also wants to make its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and is also working on them.
One of the last segments of the extensive video was a discussion about Apple’s reliance on TSMC. This is indeed seen as a risk factor for several well-known reasons. It is expected, therefore, that Samsung and Intel will become practical alternatives to TSMC for Apple in the not-too-distant future.