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

Obvious move for Apple

[morgan_greywolf]

Apple is increasing moving into embedded and mobile markets more and more with iPhone, iPod, etc. I think we're going to start to see more small footprint devices from Apple in the future, maybe even something that creates a whole new product category. Information-based devices and appliances are the future, and Apple is one of the companies poised to do great things in this market.

This is a precursor to some big things and I think Apple is taking itself in an entirely new direction.

Just me $0.02.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[somersault]

I doubt that at this point in time. This chip company specialises in low power chips for small devices, not desktop chips. Though introducing a super efficient desktop processor would be nice. We need to move away from x86 to a modern design, rather than one that has gradually been modified beyond all recognition and hacked to gain 32 bit then 64 bit compatibility, etc. As an Amiga/Mac user for most of my early life, I've always thought of x86 as an inferior and inefficient chip design. Apple has demonstrated twice now how well they can adapt their OS for any architecture. Would be nice if Microsoft took up the challenge..

One bright little commenter on El Reg suggested that another reason for Apple buying this company could be for a console release, as Apple recently acquired a patent which could be for console gaming.

Re:A blow to ARM?

[TheRaven64]

And, looking at Dan Dobberpuhl's biography, he was also a design leader on the StrongARM project, so it's not like he doesn't have experience designing ARM cores...

PowerPC Makes Sense for Apple

[BBCWatcher]

I've always wondered why Steve Jobs didn't announce a dual-architecture strategy from the get-go. But perhaps that was the plan all along, and Apple simply needed to announce "Intel only" to get all their developers moved as quickly as possible to universal binaries. Now that Microsoft and Adobe, the last holdouts, have complied, Apple can go back to a dual (or even tri, with iPhone's ARM) architecture approach, choosing the right processor core for the right device and maximizing its flexibility and distinctiveness.

For example, the PowerPC core would be perfect for AppleTV and possibly a new Mac nano, where the cost of an Intel chip simply doesn't make sense. Apple is probably losing money on every AppleTV box right now. Every universal binary already runs on PowerPC, so all the applications and development ecosystem are already in place. The fact VMware and Parallels don't run on PowerPC is a feature, not a bug: Apple can wean some more users away from Microsoft Windows as certain devices hit the market and get some better market segmentation. Users who want Intel can buy Intel, and users who want alternative form factors, alternative power consumption profiles, lower cost, and/or new device categories can get PowerPC under the hood and still run the full Mac OS X portfolio of software. And having their own chip company helps keep Intel honest. Apple probably didn't like Intel's forced march from Santa Rosa to Penryn. That was inconsistent with Apple's longer product cycles. And all the game consoles are PowerPC-based, so that could be appealing if Apple ever wants to entice some game developers over to some of their devices. (Games do tend to work down on the iron.) IBM continues to underwrite PowerPC for its own server lines and has cranked up POWER6 to 5.0 GHz in its servers, way beyond Intel's best, so it's still an architecture with a lot of interesting advantages.

Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple

[cowscows]

It's debatable. There have been plenty of people who've said that if they were in Apple's position, they'd license the Mac OS and let others battle it out to make the hardware. That would be a seriously foolish move for Apple partly because they make so much money off of hardware, but also because one of their main design philosophies is designing the whole "widget". Apple seems to really like being in direct control of as many pieces of their products as they can. I bet if they thought they could realistically design and manufacture their own CPUs, they'd do that to.

Maybe they've got something in mind but that they don't think they can convince different chip makers to move in that direction. They've just got a ton of cash laying around, maybe they felt like taking a little risk is worth it to get certain types of chips that they really want. This isn't Apple just blindly jumping into an industry that they have no idea about. There's got to be a specific reason for this.