Communications of the ACM
A Look Inside Apple's Silicon Playbook
Johny Srouji, an Israeli-born engineer who previously worked at Intel and IBM, joined Apple in 2008, specifically to lead Apple in making its own silicon.
Credit: Apple
This week Apple introduced a set of new MacBook Pro laptops. During the prerecorded launch event, Apple's engineers and executives made it clear that the MVPs in these new products are the chips that power them: the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. With 34 billion and 57 billion transistors, respectively, they are the engines powering the new Mac devices' super hi-res displays, providing blazing speed, and extending battery life. The laptops represent the apotheosis of a 14-year strategy that has transformed the company—literally under the hood of its products—in a massive effort to design and build its own chips. Apple is now methodically replacing microprocessors it buys from vendors like Intel and Samsung with its own, which are optimized for the needs of Apple users. The effort has been stunningly successful. Apple was once a company defined by design. Design is still critical at Apple, but I now consider it a silicon company.=
From Wired
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