Apple Buys a Chip Company for $278M

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's just bought a chip company, P.A. Semi that could make chips for iPhones and maybe iPods. Apple wouldn't reveal the exact plans, but Dan Dobberpuhl, lead designer of Alpha's chips, is known for making super efficient processors, like a 64-bit dual core last year that was supposedly about 300% more efficient than the nearest competition, using only 5 to 13 watts at 2GHz. Apple's quarterly results are later today, so we might hear more about the deal. This is something of a blow to ARM, especially with the mobile chip market heating up recently, with forays by Intel and Nvidia adding to competition from established players like VIA."

Comments

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[aliquis]

I doubt Apple and Steve gives a shit about gaming considering how much they care with the computers and OS. If they did wouldn't it be a good start to make that part work first?

Wasn't some PPC chip from PA Semi mentioned together with some Genesi-stuff like a year ago or so? Their webpage say that they do Power based cpus. So I'm sure Apple could use them if they wanted to, and the Slashdot text mention 2GHz dual core at 5-13 watt, I'd prefer a 2GHz dual core 64-bit powercpu in my MBP before the 2.2GHz C2D I have now running at what is it? 37? More in merom? + That is "typical."

I doubt they will change, but with Power/PPC chips available in the company and all software code in place for it already why not?

But then again they could use it for whatever non-mac aswell.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[somersault]

No, IANAmicroprocessordesignengineer, I did used to read up a lot on the differences between 68k/PPC/x86, though that was a long time ago, and a year or two on /. was reading about the DEC Alpha and how far ahead of its time it was, doing things that x86 has only caught up to in the last few years. I understand that it's impractical to move to new architectures just because most software is tied to Windows, but arguments like "it doesn't take much to emulate x86" are pretty crap. Companies like the one in TFA (admittedly by the same guy that was leading the Alpha design team, so maybe it's just because he's a genius) show that it is possible to do a lot better in terms of power and computational efficiency than we are with x86. Thankfully Intel were forced to get their arses in gear by AMD a couple of years ago, and they've made some nice advances with x86, though they're probably going to get lazy again in a few years.

The whole thing is still kind of moot while we're tied to Windows though. They've not even made Vista 64-bit only! If backwards compatibility and such really is the reason that Windows is such a mess, then why not make a clean break? The whole situation with software and hardware architectures being limited by monopolistic practices/market forces is just a huge PITA. Maybe I am just a retard who isn't aware of the strides that Intel are making in processor design (I have read a couple of things about predictive branching and such in more recent processors which sounds pretty cool, and a good use of multicore architectures if it's using the extra cores instead of just doing branch prediction on each core, though the distances involved there may negate possible performance benefits..), but hearing stuff about amazingly efficient processors that probably aren't going to see mainstream desktop use just pisses me off, because we don't even have a choice. We shouldn't always be using 'modern processor designs' just to interpret legacy code, we should be able to get apps compiled specifically for our architecture.