Cringely about Apples acquisition of PA Semiconductor

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Cringely about Apples acquisition of PA Semiconductor

Friday, April 25. 2008

Cringely has a really interesting opinion about the recent acquisition of PA Semi by Apple. He thinks, that this move will lead us to an Apple system, where even the CPU is a custom-build circuit from Apple optimized for MacOS X. The arguments for his ideas sound quite reasonable.

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in Apple, English at 22:23 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)
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Quote of S.Jobs:

“We have a great partnership with Intel,” Jobs said. “We expect that to continue forever.”»

http://www.fscklog.com/2008/04/steve-jobs-ber.html

Looks like they just want to custom design some iPhon/iPod chips.

cheers

Alex

#1 Alex on 2008-04-26 00:02 (Reply)

I assume IBM thought that, too

#1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-26 07:09 (Reply)

I dont think so, Apple was quite upset with the G5 situation, e.g. here:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/09/01.4.shtml

Intel now even has Atom, i.e. they are expanding their portfolio. Why should Apple try to reinvent the wheel, and do an own, custom design CPU... cost cutting ?
No, there is nothing more expensive then designing, testing and manufacturing a state of the art CPU ..

It can pay of either through the high price, e.g. server market or, through high volume, i.e. mass production, e.g. the eeePC.

However Apple is not in any of those market segments and I doubt that they are trying to enter one.

cheers

Alex

#2 Alex on 2008-04-26 10:39 (Reply)

Atom is no competition for the dedicated low power procs. These application need a proc, a baseband, wlan and the rest in the powerbudget Atom needs without all this circuits.

I´ve learned in the past by observing Apple, that they have a long planing horizon. And at the moment they wouldn´t tell of their future plans, because of their prefered status at Intel (like the smaller packaging for the Mac Book Air).

BTW: I don´t think chip design is inherently expensive. Just the way, we design procs now is expensive. We take old architectures like Power or x86 and try to press this architecures further and further with extreme methods. Steping back and work on different concepts may bring the the costs for chip design into an resonable range. And Apple has the advantage to control the operating system of their environment, thus they can specifically design the CPU for the OS and the OS for the CPU.

#2.1 Joerg M. (Homepage) on 2008-04-26 16:05 (Reply)

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