How can you even have 1000 people designing a chip? A micro-processor is not THAT complicated. Perhaps you can have people doing research on particular aspects, but research teams are typically small (maybe 5-15 people). It seems to me difficult to believe that it's even possible to have that number of people designing a single and insular hardware product, of which the manufacturing is being outsourced (so they don't have to build the making-machines).
I interviewed with their ASIC design team last year (they made me an offer, which I did not take).
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.
Though it makes sense that 1000 people on one component is an unrealistic estimate, your logic here is a caricature. How many different groups of people are, for instance, involved in a single game title? Similar dynamics in chip production: you have design teams, verification teams, tools teams, and support staff for 3-4 levels of functionality.
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.
You'll likely have multiple R&D teams competing against each other, with support teams for each. Don't forget to include operations, assembly, shipping, and any teams directly needed to support this research and development of new chips.
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.
Beyond the fact that they're probably working on multiple chips, a modern CPU is incredibly complicated, and SoC architectures add another level of complexity to the equation. The idea of having 100s of people involved in the design is not at all surprising.
Applied Materials (etc.) build the making-machines anyway.
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.
They probably don't all work on the same chip even if the final results are worked down into a SOC. They probably have teams working on the graphics side as well as the audio processor.
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How can you even have 1000 people designing a chip? A micro-processor is not THAT complicated. Perhaps you can have people doing research on particular aspects, but research teams are typically small (maybe 5-15 people). It seems to me difficult to believe that it's even possible to have that number of people designing a single and insular hardware product, of which the manufacturing is being outsourced (so they don't have to build the making-machines).
I interviewed with their ASIC design team last year (they made me an offer, which I did not take).
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.
Though it makes sense that 1000 people on one component is an unrealistic estimate, your logic here is a caricature. How many different groups of people are, for instance, involved in a single game title? Similar dynamics in chip production: you have design teams, verification teams, tools teams, and support staff for 3-4 levels of functionality.
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.
You'll likely have multiple R&D teams competing against each other, with support teams for each. Don't forget to include operations, assembly, shipping, and any teams directly needed to support this research and development of new chips.
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.
Beyond the fact that they're probably working on multiple chips, a modern CPU is incredibly complicated, and SoC architectures add another level of complexity to the equation. The idea of having 100s of people involved in the design is not at all surprising.
Applied Materials (etc.) build the making-machines anyway.
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.
They probably don't all work on the same chip even if the final results are worked down into a SOC. They probably have teams working on the graphics side as well as the audio processor.
That's what I thought. Also, memory chips, LCD display and power controllers, Thunderbolt... those can make a lot of difference in an Apple product.