Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 23 April 2008, 11:23 AM
Apple buys processor company, opens whole new world of speculation
Apple doesn't listen to Intel much. While everyone's been assuming that an Atom-powered iPhone was a done deal, and getting used to the idea that MacBooks are just Intel laptops with a different OS, Steve Jobs nipped out the back and bought PA Semi. Which is a small CPU company, led by the bloke who was lead designer on the Alpha and StrongARM chips, and which now makes low-power (like ARM) PowerPC-compatible chips that have comparable performance to Intel's desktop chips.
Apple can now make its own processors.
At this point, things can go a number of ways. PA Semi's last big announcement - a dual-core, 2GHz, 25watt processor with lots and lots of integrated IO, networking and other delights - was more than a year ago, so it's safe to say that there'll be other products ready to go round about now. A quad-core was promised for this year, for example. There's no way anything like this is going into a smartphone - would make a fine laptop or desktop - but whether PA Semi had something more portable on the drawing board, nobody's saying. Although it certainly does now.
What happens next? Apple now has a very good CPU design team, together with a license for a very capable architecture. The company thrives on differentiation, something that's been getting harder and harder to do with Intel. I know everyone's fixated on that darn iPhone, but PA Semi is a much better fit for other parts of the Apple world - this year, at least - and now Apple can break free of the Intel roadmap that its competitors are marching on.
Which will make it harder for the rest of us to predict what Apple will do next. Jobs may consider that alone worth the quarter-billion dollar price tag...
PreviousComments on this post
Intresting, though I don't know if Apple would go through another chip change so soon after the intel switchover. Yes all the software is still built as a Universal binary, but switching back to power PC would lose a lot of customers that have switched to OS X (myself included), safe in the knowledge they can run XP Unbuntu or whatever on their mac.
P.A. Semi chips certainly don't seem right for the iphone, especially as this is such a new Platform - why change from ARM when it's only just getting off the ground and Dev's in?
Embedded devices could be what this is all about, perhaps apple is getting ready to unleash new ways of getting into our living room (apple TV Take 3?)
Maybe they just fancied owning a chip company?
We'll never know till we know with apple...
Another side benefit to buying your own CPU is that you can always threaten to design your own CPU chips to be used instead of all those Intel chips you would have bought thereby pushing the Intel chip price down.
A trend that the Atom and other recent low power chips represent is fuller and much tighter integration of the CPU with what used to be peripherals. Some of the Atoms have built-in SVGA processor. The AMD Geode and a Via cpu chip have similar integration.
Both very good points. Steve Jobs is on record as saying that Intel shouldn't be worried. He would, wouldn't he. The unofficial Apple line seems to be that the company was bought for its people (who are a very talented team, certainly), but that's an expensive and rather abrupt recruitment move.
Likewise, the IP I can find for P.A. Semi is limited - except that there are at least a couple of patents in there which would seem to me to be directly applicable to what I know of some of Intel's latest low-power techniques. Would Apple be patent trolling? Semiconductors are hardball, to be sure, but that's a pretty unpleasant way to treat a partner.
I can't see Apple shelling out the big bucks without a very specific end in sight, and "getting a really cool design team" ain't that specific. Nor would you buy people of the calibre of Dobberpuhl in order to bolt video circuits into processors. Lord alone knows there are enough integrated video/CPU systems-on-chips out there.
They've bought some of the world's best processor bods: they are going to be using them to build processors. They're going to be very high performance processors, for systems that don't need x86 compatibility, and where Apple has a need to add its own hardware to accelerate... what? Networks? Video compression? Sounds server, sounds appliance and (being Apple), it has to be consumer (like you're going to flog a proprietary server architecture to the enterprise any time soon).
What sort of information appliance needs oodles of smart processing? Networks, video... I think we're looking at something very clever in home video appliances, and that would probably be search-based or generating lots of synthetic output. Let's hope it's not a bleeding games console...
