Here's Johny Srouji: Apple's newest executive pioneered company's custom A-series chips
After playing integral roles in two of Apple's most important product innovations --?its custom A-series processors and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor --?Johny Srouji has been rewarded with a new title that sees him reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook.
As part of a series of changes among Apple's top brass, Srouji has been named senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. The title makes him the newest member of Apple's executive team.
An Arab-Israeli from the city of Haifa, Srouji earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science at Technion --?Israel Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Apple, he worked in silicon design at both Intel, where he was senior manager of its Israel Design Center, and IBM, as director of development of its Power 7 processor unit.
When he started at Apple, Srouji's title was senior director of handheld chips and VLSI (very-large-scale integration). It was in that role that he spearheaded development of the A4 processor, a landmark achievement for Apple that paved the way for advancements in future iPhones and iPads.
Apple's Johny Srouji, left, with Israel President Reuven Rivlin. Credit: Amos Ben-Gershom, Israel Government Press Office.
Apple's silicon development originally led to the A4, its first custom-designed System on a Chip, debuting in the iPad in 2010. Since then, Apple's electricity sipping CPUs have become even more powerful, most notably with the desktop-class A9X processor found in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Srouji was also involved in creating the first Touch ID fingerprint sensor Apple first introduced in the iPhone 5s in 2013, according to Israeli publication Haaretz.
His expertise doesn't stop there, however: Apple also noted that he has also overseen in-house developments of new battery, storage and display technology.
Srouji's appointment to senior vice president Hardware Technologies puts his title essentially on par with Dan Riccio, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Riccio has been with Apple since 1998, and currently leads the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams.
In years past, Apple's semiconductor teams were overseen by Bob Mansfield, also a hardware engineer. But in 2013, he relinquished his role on Apple's executive team, taking on a smaller position working on special projects under Cook, the CEO.
Srouji's new, more visible role at Apple only serves to emphasize the importance of the company's in-house silicon development, a key hardware facet that helps to differentiate its products from competitors. Beyond the A-series chips in the iPhone and iPad, Apple also has custom M-series motion coprocessors for advanced low-power sensors, and the S1 silicon that powers the Apple Watch.
There have also been recent rumors that Apple could begin offering its own proprietary graphics processors as part of its A-series chips. Apple currently uses slightly modified PowerVR designs from Imagination Technologies, but an in-house GPU could allow for more powerful devices --?and could even potentially allow Apple to abandon Intel for an ARM-powered Mac.
As part of a series of changes among Apple's top brass, Srouji has been named senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. The title makes him the newest member of Apple's executive team.
An Arab-Israeli from the city of Haifa, Srouji earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science at Technion --?Israel Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Apple, he worked in silicon design at both Intel, where he was senior manager of its Israel Design Center, and IBM, as director of development of its Power 7 processor unit.
When he started at Apple, Srouji's title was senior director of handheld chips and VLSI (very-large-scale integration). It was in that role that he spearheaded development of the A4 processor, a landmark achievement for Apple that paved the way for advancements in future iPhones and iPads.
Apple's Johny Srouji, left, with Israel President Reuven Rivlin. Credit: Amos Ben-Gershom, Israel Government Press Office.
Apple's silicon development originally led to the A4, its first custom-designed System on a Chip, debuting in the iPad in 2010. Since then, Apple's electricity sipping CPUs have become even more powerful, most notably with the desktop-class A9X processor found in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
Srouji was also involved in creating the first Touch ID fingerprint sensor Apple first introduced in the iPhone 5s in 2013, according to Israeli publication Haaretz.
His expertise doesn't stop there, however: Apple also noted that he has also overseen in-house developments of new battery, storage and display technology.
Srouji's appointment to senior vice president Hardware Technologies puts his title essentially on par with Dan Riccio, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. Riccio has been with Apple since 1998, and currently leads the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams.
In years past, Apple's semiconductor teams were overseen by Bob Mansfield, also a hardware engineer. But in 2013, he relinquished his role on Apple's executive team, taking on a smaller position working on special projects under Cook, the CEO.
Srouji's new, more visible role at Apple only serves to emphasize the importance of the company's in-house silicon development, a key hardware facet that helps to differentiate its products from competitors. Beyond the A-series chips in the iPhone and iPad, Apple also has custom M-series motion coprocessors for advanced low-power sensors, and the S1 silicon that powers the Apple Watch.
There have also been recent rumors that Apple could begin offering its own proprietary graphics processors as part of its A-series chips. Apple currently uses slightly modified PowerVR designs from Imagination Technologies, but an in-house GPU could allow for more powerful devices --?and could even potentially allow Apple to abandon Intel for an ARM-powered Mac.
Comments
I bet, the families know each other
Look what happened when Microsoft tried to do an Arm-based Windows. It crashed and burned as no-one bothered to write apps for it. If Apple bring out an Arm-based Mac, the only way they’d get people to build apps for it is by abandoning x64 completely. This seems like an awful idea to me. I’m sure there’s plenty they could leverage from their Ax chips to deliver a better x64 chip than Intel, especially when it comes to GPU performance and low-end/low-power x64 chips.
But yeah, they'd lose Windows compatibility.
- The 12" MacBook resurrection has been done with a reason. This will be the product that eventually gets converted to the ARM processor and serve as a beachhead for the rest of the Mac Line. And this transition will take place over roughly 2-3 years.
- And Apple will retain Intel based Macs in a premium MacBook Pro avatar forever. This should take care of Windows compatibility issues. If you are ready to pay top dollar to Microsoft for a Windows license, why should Apple not get some premium as well?
- There are some very major reasons why Apple came out with Metal - and how Apple has a huge advantage in how A series processors use the same contiguous memory for both CPU and GPU - which means there is no need to transfer blocks from RAM to VRAM and vice versa to do computation on the GPU. The modification on PowerVR is already so huge, that this no longer is anywhere close to PowerVR. They are just retaining some basic compatibility at the interface layer to allow easy upgrades. And in couple of versions, even that will be dropped.
- In terms of software, Apple is well positioned. Its entire development stack is on XCode, and XCode has moved entirely to CLANG based compilation nearly 3 years back. Plus Swift is taking off big time as the way to code for Apple, and that is entirely CLANG based from the ground up. After the introduction of ARC, most of the legacy code in Apple has been converted to modern code to take advantage of ARC 3 years back - all this is CLANG based. Plus any software that is running on Intel processors is just 10 years old - so this is not that big a problem for Apple. In any case, the serious growth in Apple adoption in enterprise has happened only in the last 5 years - so Apple doesnt have nearly as big a problem with legacy code as people may think.
- Apple has a ready Universal Binary format that can support ARM and Intel based code for transition purposes - and this can be generated from both Intel and ARM based Mac's because of CLANG.
- XCode already generates the code for running the same project on Intel as well as iOS (Simulator is on Intel, whereas the device is on ARM). And to the programmer this is totally transparent and automatic.
I think it is simply a matter of time till Apple gets comfortable and confident to switch to ARM entirely. Quite obviously there are Mac systems inside Apple that run on ARM.
And people are already holding in their hands the first ARM based Mac. For the iPad Pro, it is just a software upgrade that adds a few extra OS components from Mac OS into iOS to make iOS into a full Mac. These software upgrades will come over time.
No number of movie editing apps or drawing apps., and no level of iPad or iPhone continuity capabilities, no matter how awesome, will change this for me. If I have to do even one update to a stupid Access database, no matter how trivial, and I cannot, I have the wrong tool.
No Intel compatibility (with acceptable performance), no more Macs. I doubt I am alone.
Very interesting and informative post. In many way, echoes this post here:
http://loumiranda.com/2015/12/17/10-clues-to-the-future-of-universal-apps-and-the-apple-app-store/
I received my iPad Pro yesterday, and it is easy to extrapolate that iOS will grow into the space that is currently occupied by some Mac's, but I don't see Apple deprecating all x86 hardware for the foreseeable future; there just isn't any necessity for that. At the same time, incentivizing the creation of iOS Apps by providing the tools to repurpose/reuse Mac App code and functionality with minimum developer effort would seem to be something that Schiller would want to accelerate. The few notable usability issues that iOS has against OS X could be remedied with a few added API's, and some hardware evolution (a trackpad on the Smart Keyboard, pointer support like a mouse), with typical Apple caution impeding the implementation of these features in the short term.
I find that Adobe's success with the Cloud and subscriptions, will likely drive other software developers to move on from Mac OS X and Windows OS, all of which will ultimately benefit iOS with more desktop class applications. I'm confidant that Apple has a roadmap to develop ARM to fill most of spaces currently occupied by x86, but that could be the bulk of what constitutes Mac OS X hardware even in 5 years.
Overall, It's likely that Apple will have much more success with it's strategy for iOS than MS will have pushing Windows 10 to mobile.
Very interesting and informative post. In many way, echoes this post here:
http://loumiranda.com/2015/12/17/10-clues-to-the-future-of-universal-apps-and-the-apple-app-store/
You can't compile bitcode to x86. End of Story. Yes there are increasingly a lot of similar API shared between OSX and iOS. But compared to the whole system that is less then 20% similarity.
Will there be ARM Mac? Yes sure, but god knows when.