New Qualcomm CEO sees former Apple execs as key to beating M1 | Hacker News Reader

New Qualcomm CEO sees former Apple execs as key to beating M1

theverge.com

32 pointsretskrad22 comments

This is funny. They always shuffle the deck chairs when threatened. I've been that new exec guy. It's scary. You know 1% of what everybody else does, and everybody expects miracles. Realistically you can only be effective at that 1% intersection of what you know with what you need to know. So what do you do? Obviously get another new guy to pass the buck to. That way, they can't point out how much you don't know. But ultimately I think everybody knows it's not really about the few people at the top; it's just the only thing they can safely change, because, well, it's not really about the people at the top.

That doesn't make sense because just look at sports teams, a good GM can turn a team around by setting up a good team, changing the way things are done, adding accountability and steering in the right direction. Sure they aren't out on the court or field but they can influence greatly all of that. Hiring the right coach and drafting the right players.

I don’t think that comparison makes sense. A GM of a sports team isn’t a dozen levels removed from the team and their target isn’t an ever changing field of competing goals. Changing out upper leadership at a technology company isn’t analogous to a general manager of a sports team.

Well I do think that systems and policies shape a company’s success much more than most people realize. Usually, a new exec comes in and they are given latitude over a particular domain of execution decisions, most especially who is making them, but not over any policies and procedures of management, because that is defined by HR. So they have no real power, and spend their time trying to understand what is going on from an external perspective, with no real understanding of the internal mechanisms that make the company work.

For instance, the microstructure of an organization is probably the most important element of success. Let’s say the board hires an exec to because they want to see project X succeed. New exec comes in, hires, fires, but it’s still the same low-level structure of engineers. So they set up a bunch of meetings where they get fed the same watered-down technical pablum that the old exec got, until they unsurprisingly come to exactly the same conclusions as the previous execs. The regime change was irrelevant and wasteful. The question they should have been asking is: “How is this organization failing to get the best ideas and the best work out of its people?” Almost always, it’s because they are being told to do stupid things, and the incentives are aligned to keep it that way. Hierarchies based on financial allocation are often to blame. If people’s jobs rely on a project budget, they’ll fight for it, no matter how stupid they know the project to be. Execs will never get the truth about anything. A lot of organizations start with matrix management to fight this, but functional managers are lazy, while project managers are aggressive, so authority always drifts toward financial hierarchies. This is corporate poison. Great organizations get the best out of their employees by constantly breaking up financial hierarchy.

Maybe it's just me but "execs" here makes it sounds like they're talking about sales, operations, or marketing.

They're talking about the founders of Nuvia, the startup chip company, that Qualcomm acquired recently.

> The startup was founded by three former Apple engineers who specialized in chip design and worked on Apple’s A-series SOCs. Those founders joined Qualcomm, and it’s apparent now that they’ll be focusing on making chips for consumer computers (though the company wouldn’t turn down the chance to license its tech to data centers, according to Reuters). Qualcomm hopes to start selling Arm laptop chips, powered by Nuvia’s designs, next year.

Also, while they were clearly execs at Nuvia as founders, were they execs at Apple? Or is the article title just being confusing.

More on the founders:

> First is the story of the company’s founders, which include John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams III, who will be CEO. The three overlapped for a number of years at Apple, where they brought their diverse chip skillsets together to lead a variety of initiatives including Apple’s A-series of chips that power the iPhone and iPad. According to a press statement from the company, the founders have worked on a combined 20 chips across their careers and have received more than 100 patents for their work in silicon.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles...

If I understand correctly, they really are not doing actual hard engineering, level of programming or chip design. But part sales, operation and managmentmanagment and are referred to as "engineers with techinical knowledge no one knows"

Qualcomm already tried a custom ARM chip and failed at it. That was Krait. The "secret sauce" behind the M1 is that it's actually more expensive than a similarly powerful Intel chip, and far, far more expensive than a typical ARM chip. The BOM cost for ARM Cortex is pennies, while M1 is easily 100x that. Apple is in the luxury business, so they can afford to spend a lot and take margins. Android phones are not luxury devices and spending as little as possible gets you poor performance and unimpressive results.

ARM's greatest marketing trick was convincing people their architecture was so much better while it was really just their interest in entering low margin industries to begin with that secured them the mobile market. Intel was never interested in low margins, so they never entered that market segment. If you want a good CPU, you have to spend money on it.

Silicon chip production costs are based on three factors: area, layers and resolution. That's pretty much it. The complexity of the chip's design (on a single layer) is not really that major a factor. So.. Cost = Area * Num_Layers * 1/Process_Scale.

As far as I'm aware Apple M1 chips are not an order of magnitude (much less two) larger in area, layer count or resolution vs Intel/AMD or similar ARM chips. Thus it's highly unlikely for them to cost 100x more to produce. 2x or 3x more expensive I could believe, 100x... nope.

That ignores defects, where chip design and things like market segmentation come into play. Defect in a flash chip is easily worked around, but how do you sell a M1 with a broken CPU core? No M.5 out there.

FYI, Apple does have two variants of the M1, with 7 or 8 GPU cores (those have a large area and are likely targets for defects) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

Defects in CPUs (not GPUs) for segmentation hasn't really been a thing for a while, maybe the Phenom X3, and that was already a bit of a stretch from what I recall as most X3s had a perfectly functional 4th core.

A cheap cellphone SoC is definitely not pennies, <10$ is a better estimate and it's usually without RAM included which is not always accounted for in comparisons.

I vastly agree with rmah and most estimates do too.

What's a smarket?

On mobile systems, the major concern is low power usage and battery duration, not performance, hence the dominance of ARM-based chips in this field. The great appeal of M1 chip is the performance and low battery power usage.

ARM is the Microsft of the semiconductor world. The company design and licenses CPU cores for several market segments, including: ARM cortex-M series cores intended for MCU - microcontrollers SOC (System-On-Chip); CPU-cores intended for embedded systems processors (MPU) such as ARM-Cortex-A series intended for embedded systems and mobile devices. And there are also ARM cores designed for servers, for instance A64FX Fujitsu chip that powers the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, until now the fastest in the world. ARM cores highly customized with microarchitecture, such as Apple M1 and some Samsung ARM chips, are designed under architecture license.

A MCU is a self-contained chip containing up to 1MB of RAM, Flash memory up to 1 MB for the firmware; and several other peripherals such as digital IO, analog-to-digital converter, UART RS232 and so on. They are not comparable to Intel chips. MCUs are used in keyboards, mouses, car engine control unit, toys, home appliances and so on. The difference between the cores intended for MCUs and cores intended for MPUs is that cores for MPUs need external flash memory chips and external RAM memory. MPU chips and also they contains MMU - memory management unit for supporting virtual memory and operating systems that need this feature, such as iOS, Windows CE, Linux, BSD and etc.

Given that Apple isn't going to start selling M1 on a box, they have little to worry about actually.

I assume you are saying that Apple won't sell M1 outside of its own hardware.

Apple had an opportunity with OSX to take over a larger space of consumer computing by releasing it for clones and general intel/amd PCs. They flubbed that.

Now they have a dominant desktop chip they could push to multiple corners of datacenters and business computing.

But they'll keep it in their trendy laptops and cede billions in annual revenue to someone else, and squander a market advantage again. The ARM desktop lead will last about 18 months I'd guess.

But if the iPhone keeps doing well, the CEO is fine.

Apple's annual gross profit is higher than Intel's and AMD's total annual revenue combined. Apple's net income after all expenses is more than double that of Intel and AMD together. I think they probably don't need your financial advice to figure out how to make money.

> The ARM desktop lead will last about 18 months I'd guess.

I believe this claim is going to age poorly. Who’s there to take new ARM chips (from Qualcomm) for a desktop and provide an OS and apps?

Microsoft.

https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdrago...

Apple customer base is about 10% and plenty of countries are far away from the average hardware prices.

> Now they have a dominant desktop chip they could push to multiple corners of datacenters and business computing.

Seems like you don’t know about their vertical integration strategy.

> Apple had an opportunity with OSX to take over a larger space of consumer computing by releasing it for clones and general intel/amd PCs. They flubbed that.

You're pretty much suggesting that Apple should have directly competed against Microsoft. And back in 90s and 00s lots of companies that tried to do that went out of the business fast. There is a reason why buying a PC means you'll get Windows OS in 99 percent cases.

I mean you may have a point but without time machine that's impossible to prove.

> The ARM desktop lead will last about 18 months I'd guess.

1) There isn't a single ARM laptop that even remotely competitive with Apple's M1 in terms of performance and power consumption.

2) Microsoft already released Surface RT (a tablet using ARM architecture) back in 2012. It wasn't fast. Win32 applications didn't work. And Microsoft lost aprox. 1$ billion due to poor sales.

3) Their latest device Surface Pro X can't compete with Intel Core 5 laptops. You need Windows Insider preview to use x64 bit apps. And Surface Pro X isn't cheap. In other words ARM Windows laptops are not ready for the mainstream use.

What I'm trying to say is Microsoft has been selling ARM based devices for like a decade. And hasn't been exactly successful. Is there any reason why you believe they'll be able to turn things around in just 18 months?

Qualcomms only priority is having a passable performing SoC that they can couple with the real silicon they care about, their 5G modems, and it shows.

And the only reason they can survive on that is because there is very little competitive hardware out there. There is M1 and that's about it. Most others, like Exynos, the Rockchip and MediaTek SoCs etc aren't in the same ballpark as Snapdragon and M1.

The semiconductor field feels very much like the type of industry that you cannot move leadership to improve the product outside of strategy, and even then it needs to be backed by engineer thinking.

At the end of the day it's the guys designing the chips who rule, and if you fubar that up, you can't compete.

Imagine replacing the CEO of Audi to get better performing A4s. Ridiculous. Their board should be ashamed, and if I was an investor, I would be demanding blood from the board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com