Google Hires Key Apple Chip Architect To Build Custom Chips For Pixel Phones (variety.com)

A recent hire at Google indicates big changes are coming for future versions of the Google's Pixel phone. Manu Gulati, an Apple micro-architect who worked on the company's chip development for nearly eight years, has just joined Google. From a report: Gulati started working at Apple in 2009, and was instrumental to the company's efforts to build custom chips for the iPad, the iPhone and Apple TV. Apple began using its own chips in 2010, starting with the introduction of the iPad in 2010, which was powered by the company's A4 chip. To this day, the company uses custom-designed microchips for each of their devices, which make it possible to optimize processors both for performance and energy consumption. In the industry, these integrated chips for mobile devices are also known as SoCs, or "systems on a chip." In contrast, Google relied on a chip designed and manufactured by Qualcomm when it introduced its first Pixel phones last fall. The same chip is being used by a number of other Android phone manufacturers, including HTC, LG, Lenovo and Asus -- all of which goes to say that these phones all offer very similar performance specs. Qualcomm has become the de facto-manufacturer for higher-end Android phone chips, making it harder for the companies to differentiate their devices from one another.

Comments

Re: We should be welcoming commodity smartphones

[TheRaven64]

You can even modify the architecture enough that it is no longer compatible with other ARM based products if you choose

No you can't. ARM will not sell a license that permits you to change the ISA for any price: they saw what happened with fragmentation with the MIPS market and have no desire to commit suicide in the same way. You can add custom interrupt controllers, UARTs and DMA engines, which makes porting an OS a bit harder but is invisible to userspace (and to the compiler). You can also add custom coprocessors, which every SoC vendor does (for example, a lot have face detection as a dedicated logic block: you DMA an image from the camera to the block and then read back a list of rectangles from an I/O register). Apple's chips also have a smaller ARM core that has private memory that is not readable by the main core for storing encryption keys, so that a compromised device can be forced to encrypt or decrypt things for the attacker, but can't leak the keys.