“Skate to where the puck is going rather than skate to where the puck is.”
Bob Borchers, Vice-President Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple, gets a bit philosophical, though with an ice hockey quotes. And this feeling came out from him after he explains how Apple has managed to design a processor that remains relevant even after so many years.
According to the VP, “because probably one of the most important parts of our job is to try and figure out where it’s going so we can anticipate and build the tools and capabilities to get there”.
Tim Millet, Vice-President of Hardware Technologies, has stated that the company’s employees do their best to make sure that they are “not just provisioning the applications that are available today, but anticipating where applications are going to be in a couple of years”.
“So our best-in-class CPU is one of the most impactful ways that we can future-proof the device because we know that when we are improving year over year, we are going to provide more headroom for applications to migrate forward,” Millet stated in an Interview.
Further on the VP says that the same principle applies to GPUs as well. “We want to make sure there’s enough GPU in there to satisfy our internal needs for the features that we build in and third-parties. There is no end to the amount of computing that video gamers or the professional media processing applications want, and so we do our best to pack in as much as we can at every generation.”
Cupertino California-based technology giant has just launched its latest iPhone 13 series powered by the new A15 Bionic processor, which comes with a lot of new features especially the ProMotion adaptive screen refresh rate as well as intuitive Cinematic mode in the video camera.
Millet says that “We make sure when we deliver it we deliver it with our APIs and our Core ML so that it’s available for application developers and we improve that every year. But we also know that new algorithms pop up every day, and so we make sure that our CPU and GPU are there to provide flexibility, just in case the neural engine isn’t exactly the right engine.”
Apple’s A15 Bionic processor though does not offer many changes from the A14 Bionic processor, however, it is undoubtedly the best processor in the market. “Because we are so focused on Performance Per Watt and all these pieces working together in tandem, we can have these advanced capabilities that consumers can use and have great battery life and efficiency, it all happens because they work together as one team and design for a single product and we have a singular vision in mind”.
On the fact that how Apple plans for the capability of the next processor then the VP states that, “For the most part, we are working in line with our system team and software teams and industrial design teams and human interfaces team to deliver an experience… it’s all about that so we are single-mindedly focused on that. But we do technology development on the side. We do keep our eyes on the lookout for long-term investments, and the neural engine’s a good example of that.”
