Apple Executives Johny Srouji And John Ternus Talk About Chips, AI And Innovation
So let's start out with an introduction of each of you. I would love to hear who you each are and then when you started at Apple. Johny Srouji and I managed the hardware technologies senior vice president for Apple, and I joined March of 2008.
So almost 16 years, getting there. I came to Apple with the purpose of building our own silicon for the iPhone. It was a very small team at the time, about 40 to 50 engineers. And since then we have grown the team immensely. For the last 15 years, we've been building world class team that is 100% laser focused on building the best chips for our products, and it's been a journey that I love. I want to hear more about that journey in just a second, but let's hear from you as well.
My name is John Ternus. I've been at Apple since 2001, so 22 years now. I'm the senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. And as you can imagine, Johny and I partner together very closely. I started in product design, which is a, um, I'm a mechanical engineer by background, and I've had the great fortune of working on pretty much every type of product that that we make. Let's talk about why you guys are here together.
This is something that is unique to Apple, the sort of marriage between the hardware and the silicon. How do you guys work together on a daily basis? What is that? What is that like? So the hardware like John's team and the technology, including the silicon, we work together as one team and the software, by the way, this is very unique to Apple that we have the hardware, silicon technologies and software all in one place. We build integrated products that are fully optimized for the product because that delivers the best optimized software for the hardware. We get to design the chips ahead of time, working with our partners from John's team and software and OS to exactly and precisely build chips that are going to be targeted for those products and only for those products. So we work together very closely as one team.
We co-design the chips three, four years ahead of time together, and then my silicon team has the freedom to go and innovate for those products. And we precisely target the feature set, the customer experience and how the software is going to fully optimize. So, no boundaries. We work together as one team. Anything you want to add? Yeah. I mean, I think when, when I started, the way we tended to make products is we were using technologies from other companies and we were effectively building the product around that.
We had an, you know, we've always had an incredible design team and we made these beautiful products. But they were they were constrained by what was available. And I think one of the most, if not the most profound change at Apple, certainly in our products over the last 20 years, is how we now do so many of those technologies in-house. And, you know, top of the list, of course, is our silicon, which, as Johny said from the very beginning, we're thinking about how, how are all these pieces going to come together to make the best possible product for our customers? Do you think that the regular Apple customer knows that the chips powering their devices come from Apple, and do you think they care? I believe they know, and I believe they truly care because here's why. We're not a chip company.
But we have a very, I think, best in class, world class chip team. And the fact that we're working together and we're building that silicon exclusively for our products gives my designers the freedom to design for exactly those the thermal envelope of the product, the shape of the product, the software, how it's going to use the product without compromising design, without compromising focus. So by doing this, I believe we get best in class compute, whether it's the CPU or the graphics or multiple machine learning accelerators on the chip and feature set with power efficiency. So users don't don't need to compromise.
If I want to get fast machine, that battery lifetime will be suffering. We deliver the best in class power efficiency chips with a rich set of features. So I believe customers will care because the customer experience that we can deliver with predictable execution and making bets ahead of time only Apple can do because we are working as one team together. Again, we're not a chip company, we are a product company. So our North Star is to deliver the technologies that are going to enable the best products, and that's how we operate. Do you think customers also care more now because chips have come onto the world stage in such a big way since the chip shortage? I think maybe the chip shortage gave it more attention. It put it under the highlight that our world today is digital.
Everything at the end of the day runs on a chip, so that gave more attention. But it's been important for us since day one, which is why we started that effort. Back in 2008, Apple decided that we wanted to create something that we couldn't buy off the shelf. At the time, we knew that we want to create a product. Our vision required us owning and controlling the silicon, which is why we started that effort. And it wasn't common at the time. You had chip companies building chips, and you had product companies buying those chips for their devices. We decided that's not going to enable our vision and truly deliver the best
customer experience. The recent chip shortage gave it a highlight, but we 15, 16 years ago, we figured we needed to own that before building our silicon. Apple always had an integrated hardware, software and operating system, but then when we decided to build the silicon, we took it one step further. One more thing about the chip shortage, since we sort of ended up there right now, and then we'll go back in history a little more. But do you think that then when the chip shortage did happen, it gave Apple some insulation against it because you were relying on yourself instead of as much on outsiders? It depends. The chip shortage is is based on what right.
The chip shortage could be based on manufacturing. Like you don't have enough scale. It could be based on some specific node that there is node I mean, process technology, whether it's seven nanometer, five nanometer or else, or it could be gated by your own design capability.
Given we own it. We own our design and we have a world class team. We were, that was predictable.
We work very closely with our foundry partners ahead of time, and by doing this we can also navigate issues like that. Is there going to be enough three nanometer capacity now that the M3 is here and the A17 is here? See, I can't talk about, you know, capacity of technology or foundries. That's for them to answer how much capacity they're building. But as it relates to our own chips, for example, if you take the latest M3 family of chips for the Mac. M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max, obviously we're working with our partner in this case TSMC, on three nanometer, and we believe they have the scale for our volumes and capability for our volumes.
How excited are you about the Arizona Project? Very much excited. I think, you know, Apple has always supported advanced manufacturing in the U.S., and we always supported having more silicon expertise in the U.S. We have thousands of engineers in the U.S. We also have thousands in Europe and Israel and other places, but thousands just in the U.S. We hire the best.
We also work with universities on their curriculum so that their students, the next generation of engineers, are prepared. And we also encourage our partners to scale their ability to manufacture also in the U.S. So, I think it's exciting. It's a great move. Is there urgency to the risk of so much concentration of advanced chips being made in Taiwan? So let me refer maybe to TSMC or Taiwan. We always want to have a diversified supply.
Asia, Europe and the U.S., which is why I think TSMC building fabs in Arizona is great and other founders are doing the same. Alright, there are other founders, Samsung and Intel and others building in the U.S. So I think that's great. We do rely on TSMC for a good part of our internal chips.
And when I think about it, it's actually very complicated. Those transistor technologies are very advanced and complicated, but I scale it down to a few principles. We always want to deliver and build the best chips on the planet for the best products.
So that's the North Star. And that means you need to have access to the best tools, including best transistor technology. So that's extremely important. You want to have a foundry that has that technology, and you also want to have a partner where objectives and goals are aligned. They're reliable in terms of execution and delivery, and they can scale with your needs, whether it's design needs or requirements, because you have multiple chips or multiple products or the scale of volumes. We've been working with TSMC for over a decade and they've been very reliable.
Now, having said that, we always explore options. We always want to get access to the best technology, and if some foundry has that and they meet our requirements, we'll always explore it, including outside of Taiwan. So, I think there's goodness to diversify. But you always want to go to the principle where can you get the best technology and can they scale? Apple's known for planning ahead well and insulating itself against issues. And so, is there a backup plan should geopolitics spiral in the Taiwan-China area? I can't answer a future plans, but what I can say is I totally support what you said. We always look ahead, we have strategic bets and we are very careful with our planning.
So let's go back in history a little bit. I want to hear about how quickly it ramped up, and I want to hear about the moment that the A4 came out. You joined, it sounds like there were 40 or 50 engineers. And then two years later, Apple's first silicon came out. Talk me through that ramp. How quickly did you have to ramp? And then how did it feel the day the A4 came out? It felt great, proud, delivering something great.
And, you know, we built something from scratch. The iPhone had the first chip through a third party, but then Apple decided, we decided we're going to we're going to control our destiny in silicon. So there were many good reasons that we wanted to to to build it. I had a very small team, and then through the time we made a couple of really strategic, great acquisitions that also helped us build that effort. A couple years later, we shipped A4 and it was a great moment, a moment of pride and sense of achievement. The team worked extremely hard and the team here, the collective team, not only the silicon team, the silicon, the hardware engineering and the software engineering team, truly delivering the best iPhone.
And when we built it from the start, we knew that we want to build something that can be scalable. Meaning you build the first iPhone and then you're going to build something even better later. And we build what we call the unified memory architecture that is scalable across products. We built an architecture that you start with the iPhone, but then we scaled it to the
iPad and then to the watch and eventually to the Mac. But the fundamental architecture, we built it in such a way that can scale, which was important for the efficiency of the silicon team and how the product team, John's team and the software team. For them, it will look the the architecture is similar across different products. How many engineers did you have when it actually launched then? Like, I'm just trying to get a sense of how quickly you had to ramp. By the time we ramped up, probably we had a couple of hundred engineers.
Now we have thousands of engineers. The other thing also we did was. Thousands of engineers just on silicon on silicon.
Okay. The other thing we we did knowingly as we started building the iPhone is focus. And focus was on the product level because the phone, you know, there is a thermal envelope, right, that you have to build a chip to deliver that there is a battery that you want to maximize battery lifetime, and you want to deliver the best performance with best power, efficiency and features. So the phone, you can look at it as a constraint when you started, you know, because it has a certain capacity, which I think was our best friend. I always believe that constraints create, you know, enable great engineering. So by doing this, we had to create an architecture that was so power efficient that when we started scaling to the iPad and the Mac, it played to our strength. Then the other focus was we're going to focus on each IP.
IP means technology, whether it's a CPU or graphics or video imaging or camera processing, etc. and we knew day one, we're not going to go build every IP on our own from day one. So we were very focused on practical about where we can differentiate. And we build it one by one. Today we own all our technologies and we have best in class for all of these. But we started one, you know, owning one at a time on licensing where we can license.
Does Apple have aspirations to be in charge of every single part of the chip, including, let's say, memory? Our aspiration? Again, we're not a chip company. And John will chime in maybe later. Our aspiration is the product.
We want to build the best products on the planet as a technology team, which also includes the chips. In this case, we want to build the best technology that would enable that vision. So if there is a technology that we can buy off the shelf and that delivers to our objective for the product, we'll do it. Because I want to focus the team on what really, really matters on the most differentiating aspects of the chips. So if there is a chip that we can buy and there is no differentiation in building internally, I would buy so we can focus our efforts on the things that really matter and we maximize our benefits. Memory, there is NAND flash memory and there is DRAM memory.
I'm not sure which one you were referring to, but you may know that actually we have our own team that builds our storage controllers for memory for NAND, and we have those embedded in our system on a chip chip, which is the SoC that chips in the iPhone and the iPad and Macs and other products. The reason we did that is we care not only about capturing the best photos, we care about the endurance of the device, of the memory. Those photos are memories you want to keep forever. We want to deliver the best, most reliable storage and fast storage, whether it's read or write. When it gets to DRAM, we also like if you look at the Mac chips, for example M3 Max, we enable an astonishing 128 gigabyte of DRAM capacity with 400 gigabyte per second of bandwidth. Which is amazing.
Like for example, if you want to run a machine learning LLM machine learning on device, it's a perfect machine. It has great compute, it has huge DRAM capacity and great bandwidth. So we want to control the aspects that we believe are enabling the product.
But we don't want to control something for the sake of building it internally. That is not our DNA. Yeah no, I think that's right. I mean, there are thousands of of pieces of silicon in our products.
And like Johny said, the goal is make the best product, focus on the the critical things that are going to allow us to do something uniquely great. Right. And I think, you know, Johny was talking about how starting with the phone and that constrained thing and then constrained form factor and then building up.
I think the Mac offered this really interesting inflection point for us, because it was the one product where we had for years been building with other people's silicon, and then all of a sudden got to build with our own. And so when you're designing products, you're usually dealing in trade offs, right? You can you can add more battery life by having a bigger battery. The product will be a little bit thicker, a little bit heavier.
You can have more performance if you want to consume more power. That obviously also goes against battery life, and it means you need fans. And if you go push really hard, it gets really loud.
And I think as we started working with Apple Silicon on the Mac, for those of us who've been building computers for a really long time, it was almost like the laws of physics had changed. Like all of a sudden we could build a MacBook air that's incredibly thin and light, has no fan 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping. And, you know, we just launched a MacBook Pro with M3 Max that is 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro we were making. And we were shipping that just two years ago. And these new MacBook pros have 22 hours of battery life, and the fan doesn't even turn on for most of what you're doing. So I think to your question before, do customers notice that we're
doing this, you know, even the ones who don't necessarily know that that we're using our own silicon, they fundamentally see a completely different computer experience. And you can't get computers like this from and from anywhere else. And so that's because, you know, we're focusing on these areas where we can do something uniquely great. The reason we actually decided to transition the Mac to our silicon is we wanted to build a better product. It enabled us to build the product we had in mind without compromises.
When it gets to physics, I always believe that, you know, we shouldn't be gated by imagination or vision of what we want to build. If you want to be gated by something, you want to be gated by physics and time. That's how we drive the team combined. And we're pushing the envelope, which I think translates to a much better machine that the customer will enjoy.
Is there a product that, you know, I asked you about your whether the A4 was a very proud moment for you. And for you, is there a hardware launch tied with silicon that is the proudest moment? Because you've been here for 22 years. Yeah. What do you look back as the most proud moment for for the hardware combined with silicon? It's very hard for me to pick one. Right. It's like asking you which your who's your favorite child like you.
And I mean I can I can name a few. Airpods was an amazing thing right. That was enabled by technology that that we built in-house. And I think I mean, I don't think I know it fundamentally changed how people use use earphones and iPad. You know, as Johny said, we started iPad using a phone chip, and then we scaled up to something much more performant, taking advantage of that larger form factor. And I think that really changed, like how people, you know, people realizing what they could do on their iPad.
And then, I mean, the the Apple silicon transition on the Mac was just it was so much fun, right? It was it was so much fun to be able to work together and figure out because, you know, we we have the benefit of working, you know, for a long time with, with very stable customers who love the Mac. And so we know what they do. Right. And so we were able to work together to develop an architecture that was perfectly suited for the kinds of things our Mac users do.
And, you know, Johny talked about the unified memory architecture and the incredible memory bandwidth. And we also have these dedicated hardware blocks like the Neural Engine and video encoders. And so they let people do things they just couldn't do before. Right? A video editor can do a huge work on a huge project that previously would have taken a giant desktop.
They can do it on their laptop, on set, on battery, which is amazing, right? And so being able to create that much of a leap forward, that was a profound moment. It was very cool. There's another difference. You know, when you look at the Mac transition and building the first iPhone. We started with an established platform. There were chips outside for Macs and PCs. The other thing, if you really wanted to build the best Mac, you probably pick different vendors for different technologies discrete CPUs from one vendor or discrete graphics from one vendor, etc..
Our approach was very different. We want to build an SoC system on a chip that actually has the best in class fully customized CPU, graphics, machine learning engines, etc.. Just for the Mac so you make no compromises and you build it all in one chip. Just delivered and built for the Mac. And then we built multiple generations.
If you look at how many generations since M1, which we launched about three years ago. It followed with the whole M1 family of chips, four of them, then M2 family of chips, four of them, and three M3 family of chips, 11 chips in just three years. Is there a reason that some of the metrics that I've been looking at, and the numbers that I'll probably report in my story, compare the M3 to the M1 instead of to the M2? We wanted to compare since we started the transition in our actually video.
The charts have comparison for M1 and M2 and other systems, but we wanted to focus on M1, so we just focus on on one chip. But the advancements are great relative to M1 and M2. So it was a matter of focusing the message. But it's all there. And then you mentioned being constrained by, you know, the only things you want to be constrained by are the laws of physics, which I think about a lot in my coverage of chips because it's it's wild. I mean, chips literally are like pushing the known boundaries of physics. And Moore's Law is perhaps one of the constraints here.
Some critics have said that Apple was advancing nodes every year for a long time, and that that has slowed. How do you respond? When you look at Moore's Law, ten years ago versus now, there is a slowdown in terms of how many advancements year over year you're going to get. And the advancement you measure, like, I want to boil it down to three metrics: the die density, how many transistors can you pack in a given area, the performance and the power efficiency. So when you look generation over generation, two things are happening.
Generations are taking longer because they are getting harder and harder. And the ability to pack more and get power efficiency is also different than ten years ago. But given again, I think this is actually one of the advantages that Apple has because we're not a chip company, so I don't need to worry about where do I sell my chips, how do I target a larger customer base versus I work with my friend here and customizing those chips for the products, so we get to wisely use those very precious transistors efficiently, how the product will benefit, how the software will use it. And that's how we can make advancements, I believe, faster than anyone else. Is there a brain drain that's causing some slowdown in advancement? It's a good question. So we have as I mentioned, we have thousands of engineers in the U.S., Europe, Israel.
And these are just the main sites. But we have, you know, across the world. I believe we have the world class team building those chips.
We have a deep, deep talent, skills and leadership talent leading those teams. We are empowered to keep hiring the best, whether from college or experienced. Many times, some people may choose to switch companies for various reasons, but I don't feel that we have an issue, because we're still hiring the best we're retaining the best people we have. And I'm extremely proud of the team we have. If you look at the advancements we made in this space.
If anything, it's a reflection of the organization we have built and it's strong. When Gerard Williams left for Nuvia, was that an example of of what you're talking about, of, you know, sometimes people, good people leave? And what led Apple to drop the lawsuit against him? Let me start with the lawsuit. We have great engineers building amazing technologies and chips, very hard to build. So we truly care about IP protection. Beyond that point. I can't really discuss legal matters, but we truly care about IP protection.
When certain people leave for certain reasons, that's their choice. That's fine. And again, as I mentioned, we have thousands of engineers and we have a deep bench of talent. Is there also room for plenty of competition in this space? I mean, I know one line of thinking, for instance, that Jensen at Nvidia and I talked a lot about is the world just needs more compute, period. And so the more the better.
Is Apple sort of in line with that thinking, or is it a more competitive environment that that you want to stay stay on top of? So here's the again the main difference between Apple and others. We're not a chip company, so we're not out there trying to compete with chip vendors. What we want to make sure is we are building the best chips to enable our vision for the products, the best products on the planet. There will be no other technology or chip that you can buy that will fit our products. That's our goal. And it's not only speeds and feeds. And we actually win in speed and feed as well, but it's not that.
We want to build the chips that you cannot buy elsewhere, and it's a combination of many, many IPs and technologies that are the best. So we, I don't measure by how we can compete in the market because that's not our space. We are a product company, which gives us the freedom to really innovate for our needs and make those long-time bets. We have great compute in our and in our chips. When you look at compute, it's a CPU. There is a machine learning acceleration in the CPU.
Our GPUs, which are really best in class for our products, are highly optimized for machine learning. We have neural engines that we built, if you remember, in A11 Bionic in 2017, which means we started even earlier that we did that. And we give DRAM capacity and bandwidth for that compute.
So compute is important for many applications, but we don't measure just by workloads or speeds and feeds because we're not out there selling our chips. We want to make the best products, And we're focusing those designs on the specific products that we have in mind. Right? That M3 Max is perfectly suited for a MacBook Pro, right? I mean, it was designed that way from the get go. I mean, to the extent that we've teamed, sitting together, talking about the physical dimensions of the chip, right, and the aspect ratio to make sure that it can nest perfectly within a really densely packed system. So that's our focus. But I mean, competition is always good.
It's always good that people are pushing the envelope and doing new things. But we're very, very focused. As Johny said, it's all about the product and how do we make the product better. Designing your own chips is incredibly expensive.
Is this CapEx sustainable? Let's answer the design and maybe John can answer the other aspect. So we have thousands of engineers. But if you look at the portfolio of chips, we do, very lean actually. So very efficient.
Again, because we focus on the quality of engineers we hire, we focus how we run our teams. And because we're not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product. And that gives us freedom to optimize and the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products. So if I step back and look at the expense. For running, you know, building our chips relative to the products we have. I think it's a pretty, pretty good deal, including the amazing
customer experience that you can never achieve. That's how I look at it. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean, if we if we build the right products with the right, you know, components within them, the right silicon and other technologies, you know, people love them and we do well and it supports itself. And so that's our that's our focus. And um, yeah, I think as Johny said, it's a great investment.
Modems talk to me about what's going on in modems and the recent announcement to extend the deal with Qualcomm and why that decision was made. So let me start with connectivity, which includes cellular and modems, but it also includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. So connectivity in general is extremely important for our devices. Most of our devices are mobile and that includes cellular. We have a strong team internally working on enabling enabling technologies that would elevate our products, but I can't really give you much on comment on future technologies and products, for obvious reasons.
But we care about cellular and we have teams enabling that, and we work with Qualcomm, and we worked with others in the past to enable our product roadmap. But modems are very difficult to do, correct? Extremely difficult to do. It's a whole system. AI are you developing a chip like Microsoft is that we're going to see coming? What does what does Apple have in the works when it comes to AI chips? So I'll give you the macro level.
When you look at AI, machine learning or generative AI running on device, for example, there are many things you need to have. But I'll boil it to three points. One is compute, DRAM capacity, DRAM bandwidth. Let's step back to compute, in A11 Bionic, which we shipped in 2017 and given typically we start at chip many years ahead it tells you how long we started. We actually started, we built our machine learning engine, we call it ANE, Apple Neural Engine, which for some workloads it is the most power efficient, uh, compute element to use. And we use it.
Our software use it for the phone, and we use it in other products, including the Mac. So we have the Neural Engine. That's one compute element. We have embedded machine learning accelerators in our CPU, we have our highly optimized GPU for machine learning.
So we have those elements. And given our unified memory architecture where you don't have different chips interconnecting through PCIe or other lower speed interfaces. We have a DRAM that is 128GB, just for example, for M3 Max and a very, you know, fast 400 gigabyte per second. If you want more, M2 Ultra has 800GB, so per second bandwidth.
So I believe we have great technologies and chips that will enable these devices. And we started early on actually, and I'm very excited about how the software is going to use this, uh, in the future. And they've been using it for many customer experiences. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean, I think this is an area that has been an area of investment for us for years, as Johny said. And we continue to push and we continue to see more and more applications, more features in our operating system that that take advantage of this.
And that's a really exciting time. AI on device, right? I mean, this is is this the future that Apple sees for generative AI and is silicon, is your silicon going to enable that in any particular way that that you want to talk about? Again, we can't talk about future. We can't talk about the future. Okay. Uh, but the if you look at the platform we have, I think a great platform to utilize, uh, generative AI, but we can't really discuss future roadmaps. Critics have been surprised that Apple appears to be falling behind when it comes to AI.
How do you respond? I don't believe we are. Not too worried. Not too worried. And actually, we have an advantage. Again. Go back to we own the silicon, the hardware, the software, the machine learning all in one team. We're going to optimize for that.
Are you relying on some Nvidia at all? Are you guys buying Nvidia. Again, we can't discuss. Yeah the three nanometer leap. My question is like how big of a deal is that? I mean it's the first three nanometer chip being used, right? I mean I want to hear how. It was the first phone and then it was the first computer.
Yeah. And I want to hear like, I guess from a hardware perspective from like the customer from the actual like, you know, user perspective, how big of a deal that that is. You know, on the Mac, we talked about just the huge performance leap with M3 Max and what that means in terms of compute performance and graphics performance. And one of the areas of that we're really interested in, and we've been, you know, seeing some some wins in terms of getting titles and stuff is gaming, right. And there's a handful of really exciting games that are coming out on the Mac and taking advantage of all this capability, including the, you know, hardware accelerated ray tracing, which we brought with the M Series, M3 Series. And it's just, I think a really exciting time of the Mac.
It's early days. We have a lot of work to do, but I think, um, you know, there's so many Macs now. Pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago. And I think that's a really exciting time. I think the other piece on, on Apple Silicon in general is just, you know, we talked about how we can design these solutions for our customers, but it's also enabled us to build some products that we previously just wouldn't have been able to do that we always kind of thought about and wanted to do. And, you know, the MacBook Air is a really good example of that. And, you know, this past summer we launched a 15-inch MacBook Air, and there's no way we would have been able to build a 15-inch product that really felt like a MacBook Air without Apple Silicon, without that efficiency and building something so thin and light and capable. And then, you know, we just we just brought M3 to the iMac. And the iMac is a beautiful computer.
It's so thin that it almost seems impossible. There's a computer behind it, much less one that can, you know, edit and playback 12 streams of 4K video. It's just an incredibly capable device. And so, I mean, you can probably tell I'm really excited about the products that we're making and even more excited about the things that we're going to be delivering in the future. It's there's just so much opportunity here for us. And the reason we use three nanometer is it gives us the ability to pack more transistors in a given dimension that is important for the product and much better power efficiency.
Apple is the first actually to ship three nanometer in high volume phone and Macs. We're leading, even though we're not a chip company, we are leading the industry for a reason. Is there any risk to being sort of the the first to market with a three nanometer chip? There were some rumors about overheating and the iPhone in particular, the iPhone 15, that that could have been caused by the three nanometer chip. I'm not aware of that. Oh, there wasn't an issue with overheating.
There were. There were rumors around that. But actually we we released a software update. Had nothing to do, nothing to do with the chip. And it's since been resolved. Yeah. Yeah. We had we had a software update that fixed the bug and it's been fine.
But is there a risk of using an advanced node? Of course there is. These nodes are very complex. Our designs are very complex. So of course there are risks.
And that's why you need the best teams across both sides to work together, whether it's the foundry and the design team. That way I always say silicon design is unforgiving. It's extremely painful when you hit a late found bug in silicon in terms of how can you recover and what does it cost in terms of time or other aspects. My team knows I don't like surprises, even on my own birthday, so which is why we're very careful when we design those chips and we validate that we everything has to be extremely checked. It goes back to the team.
You can't deliver any of this if you don't have the best team. But of course it's risky and but that's good enough doesn't achieve great results. I mean great risk and great reward. Right? Calculated risks.
Yeah, with great rewards.
2023-12-25 11:06
