It’s a face that’s become familiar since the announcement of the Apple Silicon project June 2020: Johny Srouji is Apple’s Chief Chip Architect. A former Intel and IBM employee, he arrived in Cupertino in 2008 to manage a small team of 45 engineers tasked with creating the first in-house processor for the iPhone: the Apple A4 chip in the iPhone 4. Fourteen years older Later, he headed a department comprising several thousand people spread over several campuses all over the world, including in Israel, his country of origin. In 2015, he took advantage of a reorganization of the management team of Apple to become Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, reporting to no other than Tim Cook. He is now one of the most important figures in the business.
Johny Srouji at the presentation of the first M1 Macs in October 2021
In a rare interview with Wall Street Journal, we learn a few details about the rise of Johny Srouji and the Apple Silicon project, which started with a risky gamble: separating from Intel, which was struggling to offer what Apple needed to improve the Mac. In 2017, while Apple’s ARM chips were performing miracles on the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, Mac sales stagnated with recurring criticisms of the inability to improve performance without causing problems. overheating on laptops.
Behind the scenes, Apple was fuming, and many observers credit Intel for Apple’s decision to create its own chips for the Mac. François Piednoël, a former Intel engineer, confides that “Our friends at Apple became the ones who brought up the most problems in the architecture. And it got very, very bad. When your client starts finding almost as many bugs as you find yourself, you’re headed in the wrong direction. »
While François Piednoël confides that Intel has since improved under the impetus of a new management team, the damage is done: Apple has created its competing chips and taken control of one of the most important components in its production. Even if Apple’s ARM chips were unanimous within the iPhone, this change in strategy would have caused significant internal debate, according to Johny Srouji’s own admission: it was a pharaonic project, extremely expensive. and the risk was very high in the event of a disappointing result.
“First and foremost, if we get into this, does it allow us to create better products? summarizes Johny Srouji. “That’s question number 1: it’s not about the processor, Apple is not a processor company. » By taking control of the design of the chip, Apple engineers were able to focus on the areas that seemed to them the most important, such as graphic fluidity for video games or energy efficiency. But the biggest challenge was creating chips to cover everything from entry-level MacBook Airs to multi-thousand-dollar workstations. It was then necessary to be able to predict and write the continuation: Apple should develop relevant chips for the following generations while continuing to produce hundreds of millions of products per year.
A former Apple engineer explains that Johny Srouji has gradually become essential to the development of new products and that his influence has grown over the years. He would have a highly sought-after quality: the ability to balance the technical needs and commercial imperatives of the company. Leading his teams with an iron fist, he would demand “difficult answers” in meetings “focused on problems and not successes”.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Covid-19 epidemic has caused a lot of concern for the deployment of the first Apple Silicon chips: the containment measures taken in the United States fell just when Johny Srouji’s teams had to validate the design of the Apple M1 chip. It’s a difficult phase, where the engineers have to examine all the details of the chip under the microscope… Johny Srouji then set up cameras allowing employees to carry out this task remotely: it seems obvious, but it is an unprecedented measure for Apple, which is usually very strict on privacy issues.
“What I’ve learned from life is that you think about all the things you can control, then you have to be flexible and tough enough to sail on sight when things don’t go your way”explains Johny Srouji: “The Covid is one of these examples. » A year and a half after the presentation of the first Macs equipped with the Apple M1 chip, Apple would be ready to lift the veil on its first second-generation chips at the WWDC 2022 which will be held on June 6. “I’m not going to tell you about all this”concludes Johny Srouji laughing.
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