Michal Marek Within organizational changes in Apple's structures Johny Srouji got into the company's top management. He has recently become the head of hardware technology, and if we look at his biography, we will find out that Tim Cook had a valid reason for promoting him. Srouji was behind two of Apple's most important product innovations in recent years. He participated in the creation of his own processors from the A series and also contributed to the development of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.
Srouji, an Arab Israeli from the city of Haifa, received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University's Department of Computer Science Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Before joining Apple, Johny Srouji worked at Intel and IBM. He worked as a manager in the Israeli design center for a well-known processor manufacturer. At IBM, he then led the development of the Power 7 processor unit.
When Srouji started at Cupertino, he was director of the section dealing with mobile chips and "very-large-scale-integration" (VLSI). In this position, he participated in the development of his own A4 processor, which marked an extremely important shift for future iPhones and iPads. The chip first appeared in 2010 in the iPad and has seen many improvements since then. The processor gradually became more and more powerful and so far the biggest success of this special department of Apple is A9X processor, which achieves "desktop performance". The A9X chip Apple uses in the iPad Pro.
Srouji was also involved in the development of the Touch ID sensor, which made it possible to unlock the phone using a fingerprint. The technology first appeared in the iPhone 5s in 2013. Srouji's expertise and merits do not end here either. According to the information published by Apple about its new director, Srouji is also involved in the development of own solutions in the field of batteries, memories and displays in the company.
The promotion to director of hardware technology puts Srouji essentially on par with Dan Ricci, who holds the position of director of hardware engineering at the company. Riccio has been with Apple since 1998 and currently leads teams of engineers working on the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod.
In recent years, another hardware engineer, Bob Mansfield, has led the teams working on the semiconductor components. But in 2013, he retreated a bit into seclusion, when he left for the "special projects" team. But Mansfield certainly did not lose his respectability. This man continues to confess only to Tim Cook.
Srouji's promotion to such a visible position proves how important it is for Apple to develop its own hardware solutions and components. As a result, Apple has much more room for innovation tailored to its products and has a better chance of running away from its competitors. In addition to chips from the A series, Apple is also developing its own energy-saving M-series motion coprocessors and special S chips created directly for the Apple Watch.
In addition, there have recently been rumors that Apple may in the future also offer custom graphics chips, which would be part of the "A" chips. Now in Cupertino they use a slightly modified PowerVR technology from Imagination Technologies. But if Apple managed to add its own GPU to its chips, it could push the performance of its devices even higher. In theory, Apple could do without processors from Intel, and future Macs could be powered by their own chips with ARM architecture, which would offer sufficient performance, compact dimensions and low energy consumption.
