Sketchy rumor claims Samsung courting former Apple engineers for custom chip project

AppleInsider

A sketchy rumor that's making the rounds online suggests that Samsung is attempting to hire former Apple and AMD engineers for a custom chip architecture project.

Credit: Apple

The rumor, which appeared on South Korean-language forum Clien.net, claims that Samsung is in talks with former architecture engineers from Apple and AMD. The end goal, the forum posts claim, is a custom architecture of Samsung's own.

Reportedly, Samsung is talking to a former engineer who directed the development of Apple's chip architecture. While the forum posts state that the engineer is demanding to be in control of the project and team, they don't name any specific people.

Of course, it's impossible to verify the authenticity of the information in the forum posts, so it would be smart to take them with a hefty grain of salt.

This wouldn't be the first time that ex-Apple staffers have become attractive hires to chipmakers. Back in January, Qualcomm acquired chip design company Nuvia, which was founded by Apple executives who worked on Apple Silicon and other chip-related projects at the Cupertino tech giant.

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robin huber

Hope as, Steve once said, Apple patented the hell out of them. At least make them work for it. 

ivanh

Enslaved in Apple for a day, enslaved a life time?

lkrupp

Samsung executive: “Oh look, Apple has a hit on their hands with their custom silicon. Can we do that?

Samsung bootlicker: “We’ll get right on it, sir. We’ll just copy Apple like we always do.”

Samsung executive: “What ever happened to Tizen?

Samsung bootlicker: “That iOS copy didn't do too well, sir.”

Samsung executive: “Oh"

9secondkox2

Sounds about right. Lol

KTR

They can copy.  But you need a good OS. On top of the hard ware software integration 

woochifer

"The end goal, the forum posts claim, is a custom architecture of Samsung's own."

Not exactly. Until last year, Samsung already had a custom core architecture with their Exynos line. What they want is a custom architecture that doesn't laughably underperform compared even to Arm's stock core designs.

Beats

Not the first time this Apple knockoff company hired ex Apple employees.

They fail every time.

”Hey, Bixby”
-No one ever

danox

The first step is to design a first class desktop/mobile OS, then after all of that combine the software OS elements and the cpu chip design together into workable product….At least 15 years of hard work.

iqatedo

robin huber said:

Hope as, Steve once said, Apple patented the hell out of them. At least make them work for it. 

This is Samsung! Copy and implement first and then defend.

sully54

Samsung thinks that the processor is the secret. It's not. The secret sauce is the integration between software, hardware, and the processor. You can poach Apple's entire Silicon team and even built a processor better than the M1 but if you don't have software that takes advantage of it then what you have a useless piece of silicon. 

sflocal

It's no surprise.  Tech companies always try poaching from other tech companies.

A major reason why the new M1 chips are so good, is that it's designed specifically to work will Apple hardware and software.  Complete integration.  So what does Samsung have in store with their own custom CPU?  They had Tizen, which was a joke.  Are they planning on forking Android?  

Doesn't take sense.  Samsung is a knockoff company.  

JinTech

Korea, start your photocopiers.

MplsP

KTR said:

They can copy.  But you need a good OS. On top of the hard ware software integration 

sflocal said:

It's no surprise.  Tech companies always try poaching from other tech companies.

A major reason why the new M1 chips are so good, is that it's designed specifically to work will Apple hardware and software.  Complete integration.  So what does Samsung have in store with their own custom CPU?  They had Tizen, which was a joke.  Are they planning on forking Android?  

Doesn't take sense.  Samsung is a knockoff company.  

Exactly. Talent poaching has been going on for years and will continue to occur. No real news there, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Samsung wanted to emulate Apple’s success, but they are limited by Android. Apple controls the OS and the Ax & Mx processors let them have complete integration. Google controls Android, so Samsung would need to design the chip around Android rather than the other way around. 

gatorguy

Ahem... "Sketchy rumor"

osmartormenajr

People forget that Samsung was THE Apple chip fab, not so long ago. They had full access to A-series designs from A4 up to A9, and even before A4 Apple used Samsung Application Processors the first 3 iPhones. All that access didn't seem to really work for them then... half a dozen engineers shouldn't do the trick now. But even that may have a silver lining for some of us: in High-Performance Computing (HPC) Intel is still king of the hill and I depend on that for some of my research. Every market push—including half-assed attempts by Samsung—that propels Intel to be more competitive and innovating is an overall bonus. At least for some of us.

Gaby

Leave them to their folly. The first step is elegant coding and therefore highly efficient OS and software. But you cannot - if you are aiming at producing silicon comparable with Apple’s - just go and design a processor in a vacuum, no matter how good the team, and expect it to compete on that level. The silicon must be designed in concert with the software so they can both take advantage of one another and the specific features they were engineered for. And frankly I just cannot imagine Samsung having the vision, the patience or perhaps even the resources to completely change the way they operate and produce a fully realised product, which will also mean years of work on Tizen or starting from scratch. They are always following short term trends for quick profit, and doing what I view as PR stunts such as these to give the appearance of not being behind the curve and being a direct competitor to the very many companies they try and replicate across their various electronic and household divisions. Not that I’m saying that they don’t produce any quality products, but they use a lot of spin. As an aside, what about the Exynos chips they spent so much time raving about? 

killroy

I sure like to know what licenses that Samsung has on ARM chips, because I don't think they have the same license is that Apple has.

lkrupp

osmartormenajr said:

People forget that Samsung was THE Apple chip fab, not so long ago. They had full access to A-series designs from A4 up to A9, and even before A4 Apple used Samsung Application Processors the first 3 iPhones. All that access didn't seem to really work for them then... half a dozen engineers shouldn't do the trick now. But even that may have a silver lining for some of us: in High-Performance Computing (HPC) Intel is still king of the hill and I depend on that for some of my research. Every market push—including half-assed attempts by Samsung—that propels Intel to be more competitive and innovating is an overall bonus. At least for some of us.

Except that Intel is NOT competitive anymore and is falling further behind.

crowley

lkrupp said:

osmartormenajr said:

People forget that Samsung was THE Apple chip fab, not so long ago. They had full access to A-series designs from A4 up to A9, and even before A4 Apple used Samsung Application Processors the first 3 iPhones. All that access didn't seem to really work for them then... half a dozen engineers shouldn't do the trick now. But even that may have a silver lining for some of us: in High-Performance Computing (HPC) Intel is still king of the hill and I depend on that for some of my research. Every market push—including half-assed attempts by Samsung—that propels Intel to be more competitive and innovating is an overall bonus. At least for some of us.

Except that Intel is NOT competitive anymore and is falling further behind.

Comet Lake has brought Intel roughly to parity with Ryzen 5000, at a lower price.  AMD has an edge in hyper threading, but at a premium.  And Intel have achieved that even with a larger die size; so if they can sort out their manufacturing issues then they may well pull ahead.

Xeon vs Threadripper is close enough to call a tie for the HPC.

They aren't out yet, and they are competitive.

nadriel

There seems to be a huge misunderstanding around about optimization… When using high level languages most of the optimization is done by the compiler (assuming code isn’t total garbage), not some magical level of understanding the hardware you’re coding on (in rare occasions those do exist too).

Lower level (for example assembly languages) are used in consort with high level languages to optimize heavy tasks, by making them do specific tasks fast. This could be a ready function in the language or API you call on for example to calculate the approximation of square root, imaging and creating the most efficient way to do a calculation is above most people (even at Apple). And in general all the lower level language uses are processor specific, and can’t be ported without some modifications, i.e. a specific call to processor does not exist on other platform, or there’s some other limitation or difference.

First level of optimization is removing unnecessary loops (especially loops within loops) and if statements, there are practices that are more efficient with memory calls (arrays vs matrices vs dictionaries etc..), and lastly parallelism, which is very hard to implement in some cases. I’m not saying that people at Apple are average or stupid, just that I don’t expect the average coder at Samsung (or any other big tech company coder) being different than the one at Apple really.

I don’t pretend to know much about hardware design, and I think Apple has pretty much the best (compromise between choices for) silicon on their hardware currently, but I don’t think they’re that much better as the marketing and hype tries to make us believe. Like looking at TSMC vs Intel chips under electron microscope reveals little actual difference. Video from YouTube der8auer, who has exactly done exactly that: https://youtu.be/1kQUXpZpLXI or google with title “14nm and 7nm are not what you think it is” (not the full title) if you don’t trust the link.

edit: YouTuber name typo