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
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· 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:Manufacture or design?
by
QuantumRiff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Course, people were saying the same thing about manufacturing laptop cases, like out of single blocks of aluminum.
Steve jobs seems to get a hard on from fully automated factories. The NEXT factory could produce thousands of computers a week, with a handful of employees.. (they could just never sell that many)
--
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Re:Manufacture or design?
by
EMB+Numbers
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· Score: 2, Informative
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:Manufacture or design?
by
scatterbrained
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd guess there's at least a few billion dollars difference between a reasonably up-to-date fab and the people/infrastructure it requires, and what is required to cast and CNC chunks of metal (unless it's something like sub propellers). If Apple was throwing around that kind of cash it wouldn't be a secret.
-- --
All that's left of me,
is slight insanity,
whats on the right,
I don't know. -- Bob Mould
In other reports...
by
ravenspear
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· Score: 4, Funny
It was actually revealed that their real motivation behind the Apple team's efforts is to build an uber sophisticated intelligent computer system capable of downloading Steve Jobs' brain in case he becomes too ill to continue his role as RDF overlor...er...CEO.
Re:In other reports...
by
__aaclcg7560
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· Score: 2, Funny
Don't forget the Apple sticker to put on the outside of the brain case.:P
Re:In other reports...
by
jDeepbeep
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· Score: 5, Funny
It was actually revealed that their real motivation behind the Apple team's efforts is to build an uber sophisticated intelligent computer system capable of downloading Steve Jobs' brain in case he becomes too ill to continue his role as RDF overlor...er...CEO.
I, for one, welcome our new mock-turtlenecked overlord.
-- Reply to That ||
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Darkness404
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The difference is, MS, by nature does not really innovate, they emulate. Apple, while not 100% innovative, usually ends up taking a cutting-edge idea and comes up with a polished product.
-- Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Apple Product Cycle revisions
by
nlawalker
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· Score: 3, Funny
it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM
by
gravesb
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· 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
CopaceticOpus
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· Score: 5, Funny
Yes, at last Apple will step out from under Dell's shadow!
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.
Re:it seems that this will be a variant of the ARM
by
jcr
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· Score: 3, Insightful
SJ stood on a stage a promised a 3GHZ G5 in one year (because IBM had promised it to Apple), and IBM let him down. That, together with IBM's decision not to develop a low-power G5 suitable for laptops is what closed the book on Apple's PPC machines.
They switched to Intel instead of AMD because they had had quite enough of vendor disappointments. AMD was a far riskier prospect.
-jcr
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
rm999
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So the difference is that neither one of them really innovates? I don't see the difference. Sure, Apple is good at repackaging things to be pretty and easy-to-use, but that doesn't matter when it comes to chips. In this case, they will *have* to innovate to turn their investments into something useful.
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
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.
Shouldn't surprise, they own a chipmaker
by
MarkEst1973
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.
Re:Shouldn't surprise, they own a chipmaker
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the_humeister
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They're a chip designer. Chip makers actually have fabrication plants.
Re:Shouldn't surprise, they own a chipmaker
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gordguide
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe, but it's a line not often drawn by many... ATI never had a fab.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Mini was zippy? My friend, in a Mac world the correct term is "snappy". Amateur!
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.
I know for a fact that those chips are from a different company! Do Apple's lawyers know about this?
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
je+ne+sais+quoi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple is a hardware company that also makes software. Microsoft is a software company that also makes hardware. The MS hardware I can think of is their keyboards and mice, the Zune and Xbox 360. Considering that the entertainment division of microsoft that builds the zune and xbox lost 31 million dollars last quarter, I wouldn't hold Microsoft up as the paragon of what is possible to do in hardware.
-- Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
It's a very entrepreneurial idea -- quit all the talking and hand-waving and actually ship something! There's not much value in developing great ideas that never get out of the lab. As for the claim that neither innovates? Hogwash. Taking an idea and integrating it into a viable product IS innovation by definition -- it is something that has not been done before that point. Both MS and Apple innovate, to different degrees, which we can squabble about, ad infinitum.:) I would say MSFT is far better at marketing their ideas and capturing market share, while Apple is better at inventing. Others will have a different view.
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 think also for their iPods/iPhones, Apple probably wants more customization than they have right now. They have to accept whatever chip that they are buying balancing processing power/power consumption/functionality. Incidentally this may have been driven by the iPhone. While the iPod is fine with an underpowered chip as its functionality is limited, the iPod touch/iPhone require more computing power. There are rumors that Apple was not happy with the original chip on the iPhone. The problem is the chip was exactly what they specced out. Apple may have lost the chip expertise that they had with the original Macs.
-- Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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:It didn't work for microsoft...
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Divebus
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· Score: 2, Funny
Why don't we list other things that didn't work for Microsoft.
Who has that kind of time? An even bigger challenge is to figure out why people bought it anyway.
--
Most of the stuff on/. won't survive first contact with facts.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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binarylarry
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You are completely mistaken.
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware.
-- Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Hes+Nikke
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications.
fixed it for you.
-- Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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binarylarry
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· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
-- Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Cyner
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple knows how they intend to use the chip, but that is not the same as knowing how the chip gets it done. Participating by writing various specifications and testing is a very long way from designing logic circuity.
That's not to say they can't do it, or wont be good at it. But your making a leap.
-- FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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DCstewieG
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· Score: 2, Funny
Maybe he hadn't updated Safari yet...
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
bhtooefr
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· Score: 3, Informative
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).
Nitpick: Acorn, not Apple, solely did the design of the initial ARM1, ARM2, and ARM3. They then spun the ARM CPU (which originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine) off into another company, Advanced RISC Machines, which was a joint venture between themselves (40%,) VLSI (who did most manufacturing of ARM CPUs and chipsets at that point - 40%,) and Apple (20%,) as Apple had expressed interest in using the chip, but didn't want to use a competitor's chip (Acorn directly competed with Apple in the personal computer market, especially in schools.)
Only the ARM6 (there was no ARM4 or ARM5) and newer had any Apple involvement, and I doubt anything newer than the DEC StrongARM had much of any Apple influence. (The ARM6, ARM7, and StrongARM were all used in the Newton.)
And, the ARM6 and ARM7 are essentially tweaked versions of the ARM3 with 32-bit addressing (as opposed to 26-bit on the previous ARMs,) and more cache and a slightly faster clock in the case of the ARM7. As for the StrongARM, it wasn't even designed by ARM, it was designed by Digital, to meet the ARMv4 ISA.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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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
gabebear
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the OP's point has been completely lost. Apple, Dell, and HP design/sell "real hardware", and microsoft designs/sells peripherals.
I believe the original point was that microsoft has never attempted any serious hardware development; so comparing microsoft's supposed failure to design "simple hardware" to Apple's attempt to design "real hardware" is stupid.
Generally the hardware is designed well by every company; it's the software where things fall down. I have several Apple and Microsoft Keyboards and Mice.
Of my peripherals that are at least 2yrs old that should still be supported:
1xUSB MS mouse = support officially discontinued(3 out of 5 buttons work with default driver).
1xUSB Apple mouse = supported (but only 1 has button)
2xUSB Apple Keyboards = supported (but new Macs/PCs no longer support the power-button on the keyboard to power on when turned off)
All in all, a pretty pathetic amount of support. Microsoft drops support for their own USB mice(you can still find 3rd party drivers to enable all 5 buttons). Apple didn't officially drop support, but no longer provides the needed circuitry on their motherboards to power-up a computer via a USB keyboard's power button(I'm wondering if this is so they use less power when turned off).
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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jcr
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
-jcr
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
Burkin
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· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft doesn't have that experience, because they don't build systems.
So the Xbox, Xbox 360 and Zune are what now?
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
toleraen
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My 8 year old 5 button MS Explorer mouse works perfectly with Win7, dunno what you're talking about...
Also, didn't MS design that one thing, what was it called, the xbox (or something)? I heard it was just a repackaged computer.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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jcr
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· 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."
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
artor3
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Just think how much [Apple] could power reduce and cost reduce if they dictated the chip-specs!
(I am an electronics engineer, and make chips that Apple buys for many of their products)
They already do, to an extent.
Chip design companies are constantly battling it out to get design wins at big companies like Apple. If Apple tells them, "Hey, we want this chip to do X and Y while consuming Z mA," then those companies are going to try their best to meet those requirements so that they can get Apple as a customer.
Your assertion that chips are being overcomplicated for the purpose of driving up cost is incorrect. Semiconductor companies are constantly trying to simplify their chips' designs, in order to improve yield and reduce costs, while charging the same price to their customers. It's much, much easier to improve margin than it is to convince your customers to pay more.
I doubt that Apple will be able to substantially improve cost or power consumption. While they do have some experience in chip design, it's highly unlikely that they'll be able to go in and do a better job than all of the companies that do nothing else.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
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ciroknight
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· 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...
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Darkness404
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· 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)
-- Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Re:It didn't work for microsoft...
by
ciroknight
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's really not as much to it as you think. They're just layers of etched copper in a fiberglass substrate. Intel makes a lot of reference board designs with the complete layout of the traces and layers in the copper and fiberglass, and Dell is notorious for just taking those and putting their names on it. Formerly they didn't even bother to go that far, but now they actually do change the silkscreens (and sometimes the shape a bit to make them fit in their case, which really isn't hard for even a first grader to do as long as they're not moving RAM or CPU traces). Dell (and Asus, Gigabyte.. pretty much anyone building generic motherboards for the ubercheap computer range) does this because it's incredibly cheap; Intel's licensing allows Dell access to the reference designs basically for free, which means they don't have to pay for prototypes and don't have to pay engineers hundreds of thousands a year to lay them out.
Apple has, more or less since the beginning of their company, designed their own boards from scratch, taking the chips they want, then laying out the boards themselves and sending those designs off to be built. This alone doesn't mean much; anyone who's been through an electronics course in college has probably done a board or two. However, building modern boards actually is a really damned hard (thousands of pins, some traces need to have even length, enough substrate between them to eliminate crosstalk, power/noise concerns, etc). The fact that Apple cares to do this, and makes boards that are very high quality is a testament to their dedication to build the machine from the bare metal up.
-- "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
ciroknight
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· Score: 2, Insightful
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.
So in the same way, all cars and buildings are exactly alike because they all use exactly the same materials, the design is just a bit different. Right?
Yeah, the CPU and chipset are the same. They even use copper and solder to make their boards, oh my! But there's are millions of ways to lay out the same components, and they do yield different results. Take cities: they all have similar needs (hospitals, police stations.. just play Sim City), but how you lay them out can be the entire difference between a traffic-congested, slow ass stinky, cheap and broken down city, and a beautiful, traffic-free, low crime city.
Of course, we're geeks here. We don't care, as long as it's got the bigger numbers next to its MHz and GBs, we're happy. Meanwhile, there are people who like having computers that last more than 6 months to a year, computers that don't crash whenever someone turns on the microwave down the hall or accidentally turns off the air conditioner, or who's components are literally melting off of the machine (as is the acse with my 2 year old Toshitba laptop).
-- "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
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· 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
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.
It was actually revealed that their real motivation behind the Apple team's efforts is to build an uber sophisticated intelligent computer system capable of downloading Steve Jobs' brain in case he becomes too ill to continue his role as RDF overlor...er...CEO.
The difference is, MS, by nature does not really innovate, they emulate. Apple, while not 100% innovative, usually ends up taking a cutting-edge idea and comes up with a polished product.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Looks like the Apple Product Cycle may have to be revised slightly.
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.
What kind of dip goes with that?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So the difference is that neither one of them really innovates? I don't see the difference. Sure, Apple is good at repackaging things to be pretty and easy-to-use, but that doesn't matter when it comes to chips. In this case, they will *have* to innovate to turn their investments into something useful.
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
" ... 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.
They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.
Mini was zippy? My friend, in a Mac world the correct term is "snappy". Amateur!
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.
It's already been done. Pictures of the new chips are available here and here
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Apple is a hardware company that also makes software. Microsoft is a software company that also makes hardware. The MS hardware I can think of is their keyboards and mice, the Zune and Xbox 360. Considering that the entertainment division of microsoft that builds the zune and xbox lost 31 million dollars last quarter, I wouldn't hold Microsoft up as the paragon of what is possible to do in hardware.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Steve Jobs said it well: "Real artists ship."
It's a very entrepreneurial idea -- quit all the talking and hand-waving and actually ship something! There's not much value in developing great ideas that never get out of the lab. :) I would say MSFT is far better at marketing their ideas and capturing market share, while Apple is better at inventing. Others will have a different view.
As for the claim that neither innovates? Hogwash. Taking an idea and integrating it into a viable product IS innovation by definition -- it is something that has not been done before that point. Both MS and Apple innovate, to different degrees, which we can squabble about, ad infinitum.
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.
Why don't we list other things that didn't work for Microsoft.
Who has that kind of time? An even bigger challenge is to figure out why people bought it anyway.
Most of the stuff on
You are completely mistaken.
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Companies like Foxconn and ASUS build Apple's hardware to Apple's specifications.
fixed it for you.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
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.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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
Apple knows how they intend to use the chip, but that is not the same as knowing how the chip gets it done. Participating by writing various specifications and testing is a very long way from designing logic circuity.
That's not to say they can't do it, or wont be good at it. But your making a leap.
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
Maybe he hadn't updated Safari yet...
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."
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).
Nitpick: Acorn, not Apple, solely did the design of the initial ARM1, ARM2, and ARM3. They then spun the ARM CPU (which originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine) off into another company, Advanced RISC Machines, which was a joint venture between themselves (40%,) VLSI (who did most manufacturing of ARM CPUs and chipsets at that point - 40%,) and Apple (20%,) as Apple had expressed interest in using the chip, but didn't want to use a competitor's chip (Acorn directly competed with Apple in the personal computer market, especially in schools.)
Only the ARM6 (there was no ARM4 or ARM5) and newer had any Apple involvement, and I doubt anything newer than the DEC StrongARM had much of any Apple influence. (The ARM6, ARM7, and StrongARM were all used in the Newton.)
And, the ARM6 and ARM7 are essentially tweaked versions of the ARM3 with 32-bit addressing (as opposed to 26-bit on the previous ARMs,) and more cache and a slightly faster clock in the case of the ARM7. As for the StrongARM, it wasn't even designed by ARM, it was designed by Digital, to meet the ARMv4 ISA.
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."
I think the OP's point has been completely lost. Apple, Dell, and HP design/sell "real hardware", and microsoft designs/sells peripherals.
I believe the original point was that microsoft has never attempted any serious hardware development; so comparing microsoft's supposed failure to design "simple hardware" to Apple's attempt to design "real hardware" is stupid.
Generally the hardware is designed well by every company; it's the software where things fall down. I have several Apple and Microsoft Keyboards and Mice.
Of my peripherals that are at least 2yrs old that should still be supported:
1xUSB MS mouse = support officially discontinued(3 out of 5 buttons work with default driver).
1xUSB Apple mouse = supported (but only 1 has button)
2xUSB Apple Keyboards = supported (but new Macs/PCs no longer support the power-button on the keyboard to power on when turned off)
All in all, a pretty pathetic amount of support. Microsoft drops support for their own USB mice(you can still find 3rd party drivers to enable all 5 buttons). Apple didn't officially drop support, but no longer provides the needed circuitry on their motherboards to power-up a computer via a USB keyboard's power button(I'm wondering if this is so they use less power when turned off).
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Microsoft doesn't have that experience, because they don't build systems.
So the Xbox, Xbox 360 and Zune are what now?
My 8 year old 5 button MS Explorer mouse works perfectly with Win7, dunno what you're talking about...
Also, didn't MS design that one thing, what was it called, the xbox (or something)? I heard it was just a repackaged computer.
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."
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.
Just think how much [Apple] could power reduce and cost reduce if they dictated the chip-specs!
(I am an electronics engineer, and make chips that Apple buys for many of their products)
They already do, to an extent.
Chip design companies are constantly battling it out to get design wins at big companies like Apple. If Apple tells them, "Hey, we want this chip to do X and Y while consuming Z mA," then those companies are going to try their best to meet those requirements so that they can get Apple as a customer.
Your assertion that chips are being overcomplicated for the purpose of driving up cost is incorrect. Semiconductor companies are constantly trying to simplify their chips' designs, in order to improve yield and reduce costs, while charging the same price to their customers. It's much, much easier to improve margin than it is to convince your customers to pay more.
I doubt that Apple will be able to substantially improve cost or power consumption. While they do have some experience in chip design, it's highly unlikely that they'll be able to go in and do a better job than all of the companies that do nothing else.
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
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)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There's really not as much to it as you think. They're just layers of etched copper in a fiberglass substrate. Intel makes a lot of reference board designs with the complete layout of the traces and layers in the copper and fiberglass, and Dell is notorious for just taking those and putting their names on it. Formerly they didn't even bother to go that far, but now they actually do change the silkscreens (and sometimes the shape a bit to make them fit in their case, which really isn't hard for even a first grader to do as long as they're not moving RAM or CPU traces). Dell (and Asus, Gigabyte.. pretty much anyone building generic motherboards for the ubercheap computer range) does this because it's incredibly cheap; Intel's licensing allows Dell access to the reference designs basically for free, which means they don't have to pay for prototypes and don't have to pay engineers hundreds of thousands a year to lay them out.
Apple has, more or less since the beginning of their company, designed their own boards from scratch, taking the chips they want, then laying out the boards themselves and sending those designs off to be built. This alone doesn't mean much; anyone who's been through an electronics course in college has probably done a board or two. However, building modern boards actually is a really damned hard (thousands of pins, some traces need to have even length, enough substrate between them to eliminate crosstalk, power/noise concerns, etc). The fact that Apple cares to do this, and makes boards that are very high quality is a testament to their dedication to build the machine from the bare metal up.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
So in the same way, all cars and buildings are exactly alike because they all use exactly the same materials, the design is just a bit different. Right?
Yeah, the CPU and chipset are the same. They even use copper and solder to make their boards, oh my! But there's are millions of ways to lay out the same components, and they do yield different results. Take cities: they all have similar needs (hospitals, police stations.. just play Sim City), but how you lay them out can be the entire difference between a traffic-congested, slow ass stinky, cheap and broken down city, and a beautiful, traffic-free, low crime city.
Of course, we're geeks here. We don't care, as long as it's got the bigger numbers next to its MHz and GBs, we're happy. Meanwhile, there are people who like having computers that last more than 6 months to a year, computers that don't crash whenever someone turns on the microwave down the hall or accidentally turns off the air conditioner, or who's components are literally melting off of the machine (as is the acse with my 2 year old Toshitba laptop).
"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?
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