Apple (AAPL 0.46%) managed to grab headlines when it announced that it planned to build out a 1,200-person engineering facility in San Diego. Although the company made it clear that this is an engineering-oriented facility, and while many (including myself) believed that it'd involve some wireless technology engineering, the full scope of this new engineering center wasn't clear -- until now.
Let's take a look at exactly what Apple is planning to build at what the company refers to as its San Diego Design Center.
Image source: Apple.
Wireless technology development
Unsurprisingly, according to this page (sign-up required) on LinkedIn -- a subsidiary of Microsoft (MSFT 0.59%) -- which is dedicated to recruiting talent for Apple's San Diego Design Center, the company is hiring all sorts of wireless technology talent.
Here's Apple's pitch to prospective wireless technology engineers:
Apple wireless designers continuously enhance the performance of our products to pave the way for all-new user experiences, by taking advantage of our innovations in cellular technology, connectivity, and wireless sensing. Be part of the group that pushes the industry boundaries of what wireless systems can do and improve the product experience for our customers across the world.
Now, Apple would, of course, need wireless engineers to support the development of products like the iPhone even if it weren't planning to build its own modems. However, given that many of the roles that Apple says are available are specifically related to wireless chip development, this is yet another clear sign that Apple is planning to vertically integrate the development of core wireless chip technology.
Media and Neural Engine technology development
Apple also says that it's "growing our Media and Neural Engine team -- hiring architects, design engineers, and design verification engineers."
Both the media as well as neural engine subsystems of Apple's mobile processors are critical to delivering the user experiences that the company has in mind for its products.
For example, a typical mobile processor has dedicated media engines that can allow for the decoding and encoding of video streams. The capabilities of those engines impact everything from how efficiently a device can play back high-resolution videos to the quality of FaceTime calls.
Apple has also recently begun embedding a so-called neural engine into its mobile processors -- a dedicated piece of silicon that can handle certain machine learning computations much more efficiently than a CPU or even a GPU can. As machine learning becomes an increasingly integral part of the mobile device experience (Apple is going to need to keep pushing new use cases to get people to upgrade from older iPhones), Apple will need to keep dramatically improving the performance of its neural engine technology.
In just two generations, Apple has made substantial progress here. The first Apple neural engine could perform only 600 billion operations per second, but the second version can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- a more-than-sixfold increase in performance. I believe that when Apple announces its next-generation iPhones in September 2019, we'll see another large leap in neural engine performance.
Investor takeaway
For years now, Apple has been on the cutting edge of mobile chip design, something that has had a positive impact on the capabilities of key product lines like iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It's clear that as the company brings its San Diego Design Center online, it'll add more top semiconductor engineering talent to its ranks, helping to ensure that it continues to stay on the cutting edge of mobile chip technology.
