Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era

Now, Jobs has brought even more technical capability in-house, figuring that he had never needed to have the technical knowhow himself, but what he needs is ability to manage people, and recruit the best and then give them the opportunity to do something beyond what they would have been capable of on their own.

It's techcrunch so of course the number was pulled out of the author's backside.

But the PA Semi team is way larger than 20 engineers, that's for sure. Even before the acquisition by Apple, they had way more engineers than 20. I'm the guy who filmed their product launch at the Power Conference.

It's not inconceivable that Apple would have many teams working on many different ideas and designs that compete with each other. Apple is brilliant at understanding you need to disrupt yourself, before other companies disrupt you.

And that's before you start picking apart the system-on-a-chip stuff, which involves design and verification for all the components that the processor talks to, and tooling, layout, &c.

As for "how can you have 1000 people involved", well, a modern chip can have a billion transistors on it. The MOSTek 6502 design team was nine people, although maybe you could argue that only five of them were design engineers. The chip contained about 3500 transistors, about 700 per design engineer.

If a modern design team applied the same amount of attention per transistor as the 6502 team, it would need to contain 1.3 million people.

the 1000 number might be large, but definitely in the ball park. Designing a microprocessor is not that easy. Besides the ARM core(s), you have the graphics cores, custom DSPs (I heard they have Siri-specific cores in the A5), power control logic, various IO macros and other random stuff. You need an architecture team to figure out what needs to go there and how things interact, a micro architecture team to develop the RTL, a test team to make sure the RTL behaves as planned, a physical implementation team to transform all this mess into polygons that run at desired speeds, various tool/methodology support teams to develop internal flows, evaluate tools and make sure everybody is following the rules and nobody forgot anything, plus various levels of management.

note that most probably they are working on a couple of different designs at the same time.

Smartphones are obviously wearable computers and they already exist.

They're known for their high quality displays and they already have a lot of the other technology that would be coupled with it - FaceTime, Siri, iCloud/iTunes, App store.

In fact, I think Siri and Facetime are both the key parts here. If you can get your TV to do things for you (eg book flights) and also use it as a simple communication point (FaceTime) - its in the realm of "future technology" that people think of when they imagine what's coming.

"The post PC era" is meant to refer to a world where (except in some specific professional contexts) people largely stop buying PCs because of a new class of mobile devices that takes over their workload entirely.

If I say "the mobile era" to people, that means something very different than "the post PC era". This is what language is for. We create new words so we can talk about new things, even when they're small changes.

Larry Ellison whines about the word "cloud" and insists it's just "servers". But "cloud" is about instantaneous provisioning and other infrastructure that lets you target an undifferentiated set of servers, rather than having to administer each server one by one. And unlike a "cluster" you don't generally own the whole thing. What word should we use, if not "cloud"?

Yes, it's still servers. Yes, the iPad is a mobile device. Yes servers and mobile devices are old. But whats your problem with using new words for the parts of these phenomena which are new?