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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."
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.
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".