Posted by
timothy
on from the jalapeno-flavored-are-great dept.
afabbro writes "There are scatteredreportstoday that Apple is building a team to design its own chips, with an eye towards reducing power consumption on iPods and iPhones."
design it's own chips, not manufacture
by
Gary+W.+Longsine
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that Apple is planning to build their own fab.
-- If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Manufacture or design?
by
Cutie+Pi
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· Score: 4, Informative
There's a big difference between manufacturing a chip and designing one. Unless Apple suddenly acquires the capital and know how to run a fab, manufacturing is best left to foundries like TSMC.
I'd even be surprised if they did the design completely in-house. Most likely it would be a collaborative effort with an already established low-power design house like ARM.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Gary+W.+Longsine
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· Score: 5, Informative
Apple participated in the design of the PowerPC. That worked out pretty well. I've had two people tell me within the past week that they went back and used a PowerPC Mac Mini (both upgraded to 1GB of RAM) and how zippy it was under Leopard. They were surprised, since the systems were something like 5 years old, and max out at 1GB of RAM.
Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).
Apple is also a participant in LLVM, which is going to help Apple shorten the design-to-deployment cycle for new silicon.
It's going to work out just fine.
-- If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
May? MAY???
by
gordguide
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· Score: 4, Informative
"... Reports Say Apple May Manufacture Its Own Chips..."
"... "PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, according to The New York Times during Apple's June 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference...."
From the Horse's Mouth, 9 months ago, announced publicly at the WDC. I think I would be going with "... will manufacture it's own chips..." since that's what they said they would be doing, right out loud in front of God and everybody.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
ThrowAwaySociety
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· Score: 5, Informative
Before the Intel switch, Apple absolutely designed its own chipsets and boards. Apple was responsible, for example, for the first marrying of the PPC 970 and HyperTransport.
Apple has never owned a fab, but then, neither do many dedicated chip "manufacturers."
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Grishnakh
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't know for sure, but just because they own a chip "manufacturer" doesn't mean they own a fab. I'd be willing to bet they don't. There's lots of semiconductor companies that don't have fabs at all; they're called "fabless". P.A. Semi was probably one of them. Here's some others you may have heard of: Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Marvell, MediaTek, ATI (before AMD acquired them), Xilinx. Here's an article about them. These companies simply design chips; they get other companies called "foundries" to make their chips for them. The largest and oldest of these is TSMC, a Taiwanese company.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Darkness404
·
· Score: 4, Informative
And we all know how well the 360 ended up turning out. Lets see, drives that scratched disks, red rings of death, etc. Sure, they have fixed most of their problems now, but at the start of the 360 lifetime it was a total mess. On the other hand, the PS3 and Wii consoles had little to no issues (about the only one I can think of is that some Wii units could have a dirty optical lens because of smoke, dust, etc. that made it hard to read some dual-layer disks but that is mostly all fixed now)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that Apple is planning to build their own fab.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
There's a big difference between manufacturing a chip and designing one. Unless Apple suddenly acquires the capital and know how to run a fab, manufacturing is best left to foundries like TSMC.
I'd even be surprised if they did the design completely in-house. Most likely it would be a collaborative effort with an already established low-power design house like ARM.
Apple participated in the design of the PowerPC. That worked out pretty well. I've had two people tell me within the past week that they went back and used a PowerPC Mac Mini (both upgraded to 1GB of RAM) and how zippy it was under Leopard. They were surprised, since the systems were something like 5 years old, and max out at 1GB of RAM.
Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).
Apple is also a participant in LLVM, which is going to help Apple shorten the design-to-deployment cycle for new silicon.
It's going to work out just fine.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
" ... Reports Say Apple May Manufacture Its Own Chips ..."
" ... "PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, according to The New York Times during Apple's June 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference. ..."
From the Horse's Mouth, 9 months ago, announced publicly at the WDC. I think I would be going with " ... will manufacture it's own chips ..." since that's what they said they would be doing, right out loud in front of God and everybody.
Before the Intel switch, Apple absolutely designed its own chipsets and boards. Apple was responsible, for example, for the first marrying of the PPC 970 and HyperTransport.
Apple has never owned a fab, but then, neither do many dedicated chip "manufacturers."
I don't know for sure, but just because they own a chip "manufacturer" doesn't mean they own a fab. I'd be willing to bet they don't. There's lots of semiconductor companies that don't have fabs at all; they're called "fabless". P.A. Semi was probably one of them. Here's some others you may have heard of: Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Marvell, MediaTek, ATI (before AMD acquired them), Xilinx. Here's an article about them. These companies simply design chips; they get other companies called "foundries" to make their chips for them. The largest and oldest of these is TSMC, a Taiwanese company.
And we all know how well the 360 ended up turning out. Lets see, drives that scratched disks, red rings of death, etc. Sure, they have fixed most of their problems now, but at the start of the 360 lifetime it was a total mess. On the other hand, the PS3 and Wii consoles had little to no issues (about the only one I can think of is that some Wii units could have a dirty optical lens because of smoke, dust, etc. that made it hard to read some dual-layer disks but that is mostly all fixed now)
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