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."
it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM
by
gravesb
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The WSJ story talked about how Apple had designed a variant already, but were unhappy that so much design was being sold to other companies. It looks like they want to design their own extension of the ARM and gain a real competitive advantage. Certain aspects include better power consumption, network interface, handwriting recognition, and more horsepower. There is some speculation that it will also bleed over to the desktop design. Maybe they are getting tired of using commodity hardware and want to differentiate themselves from Dell.
-- http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Re:it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM
by
cabjf
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· Score: 3, Interesting
No, they dropped PowerPC because IBM couldn't keep up with producing faster chips and lower power envelopes (for laptops). Remember, they were never able to stuff a G5 into a Powerbook. I doubt it had anything to do with whether the hardware was "commodity" or not.
yawn - another ARM licence
by
jc66
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They'll just hire some taiwanese design team to take and ARM core and hang some extra bits on it like a functions for mp3 decoding, then get TSMC or some other taiwanese Fab to produce it.
AFAIK they didn't even design the ipod tech themselves, just decide on the look of the thing and contract all the rest out.
Re:yawn - another ARM licence
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Actually, at my university's job tracker, Apple has had VLSI design job postings up for well over a month, with a description very similar to what the articles are suggesting.
Title correction...
by
burnin1965
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Reports Say Apple May DESIGN Its Own Chips
The objective likely to be more proprietary enhancements to their product lines that require licensing and royalties from secondary vendors who wish to manufacture and sell peripherals and products to work with Apple products. Its all about building monopolies, U.S. businesses believe competition is a bad thing.
Re:Manufacture or design?
by
cabjf
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
rAiNsT0rm
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Nope, not even close. Apple *designs* or works with manufacturers to create custom *designed* boards and hardware but they build nothing. They are the same chips and chipsets as Dell, which actually does the same thing and custom *designs* their gear just like Apple.
Take off the rose colored glasses please.
-- http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I doubt that the hackintoshes are a serious concern to Apple. The fact they exists demonstrates that a certain market exists, but not one that's likely too profitable right now. It's something relatively few people are willing to do, or even have the knowledge (or at least patience) to pull off. Not much of a problem among the Slashdot crowd, but certainly among the general public. More importantly, in order to fight that off, Apple would have to transition back off of the x86 architecture - not a feat of engineering that they probably want to do again after the PPC switch.
More likely, it's for specialized chips in upcoming devices. Something along the lines of the custom-designed Intel chip that went into the Macbook Air. It's the whole argument of DRM* - you can either spend your time trying to come up with technological measures to stop people doing something, or you can innovate and make products that people want to buy by addressing an existing market (or often in Apple's case, creating an entirely new one). While Apple is certainly a very closed vendor on the whole, I think they're better off putting their resources towards innovation rather than protection.
*Yes, I'm aware of the DRM in OS X, particularly with regard to BIOS/EFI. I'd call it quite unobtrusive compared to the phone-home activation in Windows, but that's overall quite irrelevant to this discussion.
-- How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Re:Manufacture or design?
by
UnknowingFool
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
-- Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
jcr
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When Apple moves into a new area, they go and hire the people they need to do it right. They knew nothing about retailing, so they hired Ron Johnson. When they decided to make the iPod, they hired Tony Fadell, who had a lot of experience in portable devices.
Apple now employs Dan Dobberpuhl , who was the lead architect of the DEC Alpha, and the StrongARM. He was the founder of PA Semi. One of their more recent hires was a GPU designer at ATI and AMD, who also happens to have worked on the Pixar Image Computer back before Pixar became a movie studio.
The way I read the writing on the wall is Apple's going to start making their own CPUs, and possibly their own GPUs as well. Whatever they come up with, I expect it to fit in very well with the work they're doing on LLVM and their software OpenGL implementation.
-jcr
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
jcr
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs?
That would depend on what advantages they thought they could gain from it. They can certainly afford to do it, they've got about 37 billion dollars in cash on hand, they've got most of the talent they'd need for such a project, and they could easily recruit anyone else they might need. Building a whole new architecture isn't an opportunity that comes along that often for a hardware designer these days.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel
That's the market for commodity parts. It doesn't apply to vertically integrated companies like IBM with their POWER CPUs or Sun with the SPARC. The question for Apple isn't whether a new CPU would fly with other users, it would be whether it works for Apple's needs. Outside OEM sales would be gravy.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that Apple's very big on recruiting the top talent in any area they go into, and you don't get the best chip designers by offering them run-of-the-mill projects to work on.
-jcr
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs). Technologically, there's no reason why this can't happen but one must consider that Apple's hardware sales are quite profitable and that share is worth protecting.
I find this hard to believe. I doubt Apple cares about individuals building hackintoshes and using them for themselves. The amount of work to do this is considerable for most people (present company excluded) and would never amount to a tangible loss of sales since those people are obviously unwilling to pay Apple's higher prices anyway. Now for companies like the notorious Psystar that are trying to make money off the mass marketing and sale of hackintoshes, Apple already has a great tool in place for dealing with this: the US legal system. As expensive as lawyers are, I'll bet that they only cost a small fraction of the amount of money that starting your own semiconductor design/fabrication division would cost. Frankly, I've seen no indication that Psystar's hackintosh business is even making them any money. The only reason they're in the headlines so often is because of their defiance against Apple, but defiance doesn't pay the bills.
Now that I've pointed out the economic drawbacks of this approach, I'll point out the technical drawbacks. Apple already effectively has two major technical barriers that prevent people from installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. The first is somewhat incidental and unintentional: EFI. Despite the sheer old timey ridiculousness of the BIOS, nearly every motherboard shipped still uses it instead of the newer/nicer/cleaner/better EFI. Hackintoshes have to trick the OS into believing that they're talking to EFI instead of BIOS. The second barrier is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). It's basically a decryption chip that decrypts some of the binaries that are required to run OS X. The hackintosh community has managed to pull off this decryption with software.
So what's the next step beyond EFI and TPM? I could only imagine that it would be a more robust, proprietary version of TPM. This will probably just end up being emulated by software eventually, too. But the big problem with adding these new counter-measures is that it would have to break legacy compatibility with every Intel Mac that's shipped in the last few years. Apple has already hung out to dry the PowerPC Macs with the coming version of OS X, so if they were going to make this type of modification, it would have to be several years from now and if there exists a huge problem with people using hackintoshes, maybe someone smart at Apple will finally stand up and say that they should just sell OS X standalone the same way Windows is sold.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
ciroknight
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Let me fix that for you:
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications, as they do for Dell and just like they used to do for Packard Bell.
One more time and we'll get it right:
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications. Companies like Foxconn and ASUS also build hardware for Dell and Packard Bell, most of which was (reference) designed by engineers at Intel. Hell, for the longest time, Dell's boards had "Intel" silkscreened on them, since they were literally carbon copies of Intel's reference board and nobdoy bothered to change it.
-- "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
symbolset
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
On the other hand, AMD's market cap is $2.9B. Apple could buy them. Then the economy of scale would work out, wouldnt it?
Slashdot Mirror
The WSJ story talked about how Apple had designed a variant already, but were unhappy that so much design was being sold to other companies. It looks like they want to design their own extension of the ARM and gain a real competitive advantage. Certain aspects include better power consumption, network interface, handwriting recognition, and more horsepower. There is some speculation that it will also bleed over to the desktop design. Maybe they are getting tired of using commodity hardware and want to differentiate themselves from Dell.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
They'll just hire some taiwanese design team to take and ARM core and hang some extra bits on it like a functions for mp3 decoding, then get TSMC or some other taiwanese Fab to produce it. AFAIK they didn't even design the ipod tech themselves, just decide on the look of the thing and contract all the rest out.
Reports Say Apple May DESIGN Its Own Chips
The objective likely to be more proprietary enhancements to their product lines that require licensing and royalties from secondary vendors who wish to manufacture and sell peripherals and products to work with Apple products. Its all about building monopolies, U.S. businesses believe competition is a bad thing.
I'm willing to bet they have enough know-how available to do the design in-house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA_semi
Nope, not even close. Apple *designs* or works with manufacturers to create custom *designed* boards and hardware but they build nothing. They are the same chips and chipsets as Dell, which actually does the same thing and custom *designs* their gear just like Apple.
Take off the rose colored glasses please.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I doubt that the hackintoshes are a serious concern to Apple. The fact they exists demonstrates that a certain market exists, but not one that's likely too profitable right now. It's something relatively few people are willing to do, or even have the knowledge (or at least patience) to pull off. Not much of a problem among the Slashdot crowd, but certainly among the general public. More importantly, in order to fight that off, Apple would have to transition back off of the x86 architecture - not a feat of engineering that they probably want to do again after the PPC switch.
More likely, it's for specialized chips in upcoming devices. Something along the lines of the custom-designed Intel chip that went into the Macbook Air. It's the whole argument of DRM* - you can either spend your time trying to come up with technological measures to stop people doing something, or you can innovate and make products that people want to buy by addressing an existing market (or often in Apple's case, creating an entirely new one). While Apple is certainly a very closed vendor on the whole, I think they're better off putting their resources towards innovation rather than protection.
*Yes, I'm aware of the DRM in OS X, particularly with regard to BIOS/EFI. I'd call it quite unobtrusive compared to the phone-home activation in Windows, but that's overall quite irrelevant to this discussion.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Yes, if only Apple bought out a chip design company. Then maybe they could design their own chips.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When Apple moves into a new area, they go and hire the people they need to do it right. They knew nothing about retailing, so they hired Ron Johnson. When they decided to make the iPod, they hired Tony Fadell, who had a lot of experience in portable devices.
Apple now employs Dan Dobberpuhl , who was the lead architect of the DEC Alpha, and the StrongARM. He was the founder of PA Semi. One of their more recent hires was a GPU designer at ATI and AMD, who also happens to have worked on the Pixar Image Computer back before Pixar became a movie studio.
The way I read the writing on the wall is Apple's going to start making their own CPUs, and possibly their own GPUs as well. Whatever they come up with, I expect it to fit in very well with the work they're doing on LLVM and their software OpenGL implementation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs?
That would depend on what advantages they thought they could gain from it. They can certainly afford to do it, they've got about 37 billion dollars in cash on hand, they've got most of the talent they'd need for such a project, and they could easily recruit anyone else they might need. Building a whole new architecture isn't an opportunity that comes along that often for a hardware designer these days.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel
That's the market for commodity parts. It doesn't apply to vertically integrated companies like IBM with their POWER CPUs or Sun with the SPARC. The question for Apple isn't whether a new CPU would fly with other users, it would be whether it works for Apple's needs. Outside OEM sales would be gravy.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that Apple's very big on recruiting the top talent in any area they go into, and you don't get the best chip designers by offering them run-of-the-mill projects to work on.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs). Technologically, there's no reason why this can't happen but one must consider that Apple's hardware sales are quite profitable and that share is worth protecting.
I find this hard to believe. I doubt Apple cares about individuals building hackintoshes and using them for themselves. The amount of work to do this is considerable for most people (present company excluded) and would never amount to a tangible loss of sales since those people are obviously unwilling to pay Apple's higher prices anyway. Now for companies like the notorious Psystar that are trying to make money off the mass marketing and sale of hackintoshes, Apple already has a great tool in place for dealing with this: the US legal system. As expensive as lawyers are, I'll bet that they only cost a small fraction of the amount of money that starting your own semiconductor design/fabrication division would cost. Frankly, I've seen no indication that Psystar's hackintosh business is even making them any money. The only reason they're in the headlines so often is because of their defiance against Apple, but defiance doesn't pay the bills.
Now that I've pointed out the economic drawbacks of this approach, I'll point out the technical drawbacks. Apple already effectively has two major technical barriers that prevent people from installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. The first is somewhat incidental and unintentional: EFI. Despite the sheer old timey ridiculousness of the BIOS, nearly every motherboard shipped still uses it instead of the newer/nicer/cleaner/better EFI. Hackintoshes have to trick the OS into believing that they're talking to EFI instead of BIOS. The second barrier is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). It's basically a decryption chip that decrypts some of the binaries that are required to run OS X. The hackintosh community has managed to pull off this decryption with software.
So what's the next step beyond EFI and TPM? I could only imagine that it would be a more robust, proprietary version of TPM. This will probably just end up being emulated by software eventually, too. But the big problem with adding these new counter-measures is that it would have to break legacy compatibility with every Intel Mac that's shipped in the last few years. Apple has already hung out to dry the PowerPC Macs with the coming version of OS X, so if they were going to make this type of modification, it would have to be several years from now and if there exists a huge problem with people using hackintoshes, maybe someone smart at Apple will finally stand up and say that they should just sell OS X standalone the same way Windows is sold.
Let me fix that for you:
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications, as they do for Dell and just like they used to do for Packard Bell.
One more time and we'll get it right: Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications. Companies like Foxconn and ASUS also build hardware for Dell and Packard Bell, most of which was (reference) designed by engineers at Intel. Hell, for the longest time, Dell's boards had "Intel" silkscreened on them, since they were literally carbon copies of Intel's reference board and nobdoy bothered to change it.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
On the other hand, AMD's market cap is $2.9B. Apple could buy them. Then the economy of scale would work out, wouldnt it?
Help stamp out iliturcy.