“Apple Silicon pushed us hard”

First, opening the door to a new revolution with customized ARM processors on the mobile side, Apple then turned the balance upside down by switching to desktop. Being a chip designer while being a manufacturer was the biggest challenge for Apple.

Chip design challenges

Apple vice president of hardware, Johny Srouji, said in a statement that the Apple Silicon project was a hard gamble and turned into a very difficult process with the advent of the pandemic.

Starting its journey as a chip designer by developing mobile chips for iPad and iPhone, Apple has a staff of thousands of engineers. Having a very restrictive obstacle such as the battery, the team managed to overcome it with a deep software-hardware integration.

In 2017, the bottleneck in Mac computers caused by Intel processors was the event that ignited the fuse. Going into field research for a desktop processor from then on, Apple spent a lot of time planning because it needed to scale from the lowest Mac product to the Mac Pro model.

Sources state that with the Apple Silicon project, Srouji’s team has risen to a critical point in product development, and Srouji’s influence within the company has increased over time.

In the pandemic period, unexpected difficulties began to shake companies. Especially remote working conditions were unusual for designers and manufacturers. Srouji made it possible to study remote chip architectures on a microscopic scale with the help of cameras. With video calls, engineers in different regions were able to take quick action.

Srouji’s team, who managed to survive the pandemic period with minor injuries, is currently working on the Apple M2 chipset. New M2 chips are expected to hit the scene at WWDC 2022 or fall events.