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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."
I'd imagine that they're talking about between idle and 100% - it's more like saying a car will do 20MPG in gridlock and 52MPH on an open highway, which are usefull figures to know.
I don't think that is quite right. If you go to their website and have a look at the documents for their reference design, it's all about high performance embedded applications. I'd expect to see these in comms applications... or purpose built high speed data handling. But not phones or PDAs or things like that.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Ultra-low power chips are enormously important for several key Apple areas. They're buying technology; but also expertise.
There are all sorts of things that Apple could be looking at this for Apple TV, iPhone, Tablet's, Apple EEPC/Macbook Air, Newton, iPod or even something different.
But at the same time they like to work with Intel on chip designs. They had one specially made for the Macbook Air. Besides the implied threat of an ability to go their own way they might find that collaborating with Intel on design may give them a massive say in the ultra-low power chips end up.
Without directly using PA Semi chips they could use PA semi to improve their own power consumption. Ultimately, $278m isn't actually that much money given the importance of low power performance to Apple across most of their product line.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Vertical integration is not necessarily stupid.
This company that they bought simply licenses the Power architecture from IBM, and then makes manufacturing/design changes to make the chips more energy efficient. They make a dual-core 2GHz power chip with 2MB of cache, and integrated DDR2 controller with DMA controller... burning just 5-13W. AFAIK, no one else is making anything similar. Atom seems similar on the x86 side, but is larger and does not have the same features.
If Apple gained the ability to produce a product that others cannot match, then the move was not stupid. If Apple bought a commodity chip maker, then the move was stupid. They can always spin it back off if the product becomes a commodity.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This was stupid.
Unless they have something really, really specific in mind that the market can't provide.
Remember, macs had SCSI despite the expense because the market had nothing that did anything similar available at the time. They had SCSI until peripheral busses like Firewire and USB arrived, at which point they dumped it like a dead rat. See also their long string of proprietary monitor connectors - the 25-pin mac standard, Applevision, ACD - the latter two of which provide essentially the same functionality for two different generations of technology.
In my experience, Apple's the kind of company who's willing to let other companies make the bits (including software), if the bits do what they need. If they can't get anything useful from third parties, they will make it themselves. The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along.... and entry level through prosumer (and even pro, depending on who you talk to) video editing on the mac SUCKED ASS until Apple bought a chunk of video editing software and twisted it into the awesome that is Final Cut Pro.
There's more than that. Apple computers now can run Windows natively or virtually at speed. Switching away from x86 chips now would be a major step back in that regard.
Don't have the resources? What are you daft? They've got like $18 billion in cash, an already in place retail network of Apple Stores and Best Buy Apple Stores, an extremely successful online store and an existing developer network.
How the hell do they not have the resources?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Apple did not not like PPC processors. They loved PPC processors.
Steve Jobs just felt let down by the guys at IBM and Freescale when he wanted a chip that did this in this power envelope and they gave him THAT, 6 months or a year late.
There is no way you will find a PowerPC processor in an Apple mobile device like iPod or iPhone. It just doesn't make any sense to try and shoehorn PPC into a market where it's never gained a foothold. It's true that the only reason PPC isn't there right now is because nobody wants to throw away billions of lines of ARM code, ARM binaries and ARM support with ARM operating systems after 10 years of using ARM, but that just makes it harder to change. Apple don't have that "legacy" (after all they run MacOS X on the iPhone, and MacOS X is already done for PPC..) but I still think it would be a wasteful thing to buy a company like PASemi and roll them into doing in-house iPhone chips. iPhone is about as cheap and power-friendly as it's going to get for a long time, so there is no point expending all these resources on a PPC iPhone.
Of course if they bought one out I'd be first in line; just I think it's unlikely.
PASemi's big markets are currently in the server storage market. I think this is more likely to be a play for the next XServe RAID, SAN software and even to bop IBM on the head given the release of POWER6. If you can't afford or justify a POWER6 system, you could probably buy an Apple PASemi rack with 16-64 cores per 1U for a fraction of the price (and greater aggregate performance).
What is missing here is some sense on the part of the news reporters, who obviously don't understand the difference between highly embedded portable devices and a low power consumption network processor. PASemi certainly do NOT specialise in low power chips for "small devices", they specialise in low power chips for *communications infrastructure* like storage, advanced image processing, cryptography and the like. I am finding it hard to imagine that a chip with capability to support 10Gbe ports and a huge amount of comms bandwidth, transitions to "it's the next iPod processor".
One little detail you overlooked is important to understanding what Apple might possibly do with this stuff.
Apple doesn't have much in the way of ARM code at all, to the extent that nearly all of their ARM code is generated by a compiler. Apple has C and Objective C code, and has LLVM sitting between the hardware and the Apple application source code. Apple can run on any hardware platform they like. They can support more than one hardware platform at almost negligible marginal cost. While the rest of the industry flails about, with their obsolete notions of "platform wars", Apple can simultaneously participate on the industry standards platform (or platforms as the case happens to be) and also invent a better platform, for one or many other product categories. Those can also overlap.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
If you look at the approach MS took to support Itanium (IA64) and PC x86 (IA32), it really highlights why the company's cross platform efforts are so terrible.
IA64 uses EFI, but MS won't adopt EFI for IA32 until PCs are all EFI, probably Windows 7 in 2010 (if it's on time, hehe). That's another three years of core compatibility failure between the two platforms.
Also, 64bit x86 and 32bit x86 are similarly binary incompatible because of MS' engineering decisions.
Mac OS X is not only 64bit and EFI savvy, but there's no problem running the same software on 32/64 bit hardware, and there's even a smooth ramp between the PPC/Intel platforms. Apple even has their OS running on ARM, rather than a seperate "mobile version" that uses an entirely different kernel design, as MS did with WinCE.
So despite MS' mid 90s efforts to make NT cross platform, it was never really accomplished in a workable way (no equivalent to the late 80s NeXTSTEP running on all those platforms, nor the modern Universal Binary Apple is using), and that's why MS couldn't sustain it.
Saying there was "no real demand" for cross platform support is a bit silly. You could also say Bob was excellent, and just lacked "enough demand." There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD.
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent