Apple Buys a Chip Company for $278M

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's just bought a chip company, P.A. Semi that could make chips for iPhones and maybe iPods. Apple wouldn't reveal the exact plans, but Dan Dobberpuhl, lead designer of Alpha's chips, is known for making super efficient processors, like a 64-bit dual core last year that was supposedly about 300% more efficient than the nearest competition, using only 5 to 13 watts at 2GHz. Apple's quarterly results are later today, so we might hear more about the deal. This is something of a blow to ARM, especially with the mobile chip market heating up recently, with forays by Intel and Nvidia adding to competition from established players like VIA."

A blow to ARM?

[TheRaven64]

Maybe, but the PA Semi guys have already shown that they can produce good designs for two ISAs, adding a third wouldn't be beyond their abilities. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing their PowerPC chips in things like the AppleTV and ARM cores designed by the same team in handheld devices.

Re:Thank God

[Ngarrang]

There comes a point where designing/making your own chips is more profitable (or less costly) than having someone else design/make them.

Jobs is a control freak, so maybe cost has nothing to do with it, but as a business move, it has the chance to work for you.

As for being a good value for the purchase, Apple seems to think so.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[morgan_greywolf]

Apple has demonstrated twice now how well they can adapt their OS for any architecture. Would be nice if Microsoft took up the challenge..

OS X is based on FreeBSD/Darwin, so ultimately it is based on UNIX. UNIX was written to be very portable. OTOH, while Windows NT wayyy a long time ago had support for Alpha, MIPS, etc., the real story is that the reason those never got updated is that the Windows NT codebase has become increasing saddled with platform-specific crap as Microsoft has had to add things for backward-compatibility.

There will probably never be another Windows version that's not tied to x86.

Bogus comparison with ARM

[mrslacker]

Except that, ARM unlike all the other companies named, doesn't actually _make_ chips. It designs cores, which it licenses to other companies - many other companies in fact.

Apple changing architecture I suppose is possible (not like they haven't before), but it seems like an odd step when there are many ARM-based manufacturers to choose from. ARM themselves wins no matter what.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[deander2]

if you think the core2 (or any of the x86-64 implementations) aren't modern processor designs, you need to learn something about microprocessors. and what pray-tell is wrong w/ keeping x86 compatibility through hardware emulation? do you know how cheap decode operations are on modern transistor budgets?

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[niteice]

NT is very portable. MS originally wrote NT for the MIPS and i860 architectures and only began the i386 work when they were nearing release. There was even a (unreleased) Sparc port.
 
Compaq killed off the Alpha machines right before Windows 2000 shipped. Microsoft reportedly continued to update the Alpha port simply to ensure portability was still achieved until the Itanium hardware was ready.
 
Early Xbox 360 development kits were PPC hardware (rumor had it they were based on the Power Mac G4) running Windows NT 4. In fact, the Xbox 360 OS is derived from that of the Xbox, which was derived from Windows 2000.
 
The real reason the ports were never updated was that there was no real demand. i386 managed to achieve dominance by the time NT 4 was released (for i386, MIPS, PPC, and Alpha). Otherwise we might all be using Alpha workstations.

Re:Bogus comparison with ARM

[moeinvt]

P.A. semi doesn't actually manufacture chips either. They are a "fabless" company, so the comparison to ARM is completely appropriate to the extent that the product lines overlap.

Apple "locked in" to x86

[AHumbleOpinion]

We need to move away from x86 to a modern design, rather than one that has gradually been modified beyond all recognition and hacked to gain 32 bit then 64 bit compatibility, etc. As an Amiga/Mac user for most of my early life, I've always thought of x86 as an inferior and inefficient chip design. Apple has demonstrated twice now how well they can adapt their OS for any architecture.

Apple is no longer free to change their CPU architecture. They are "locked in" to x86 due to their dependence on running Windows. Mac market share jumped significantly when they switched to Intel and jumped significantly again when they offered Windows compatibility. While Windows emulation has been available since at least G3 PowerPC Macs, it suffered greatly because it had to emulate the x86 CPU instruction set. The switch to Intel made that unnecessary and made emulation viable. The decades old question, should I go Mac or PC, largely ended. You could have both on a single machine. When dual boot became an option then the last barrier fell, those who needed absolute performance, gamers for example, could now have both on a single machine. Switching to a non-x86 Mac architecture would probably destroy the 50% increase in market share, 4% to 6%, that Intel brought them.

You are echoing the same argument that the PowerPC consortium made in the very early 90s. The flaw in their logic and yours is that Intel can overcome x86 inefficiency and difficulty of working with it by spending more money. PowerPC was more efficient and a modern design that could more easily be enhanced, but Intel could throw 10x the resources at x86. PowerPC did not really fail because it failed to improve, it failed because no one ever imagined that Intel could get the x86 to the levels of performance that they did. The PowerPC folks expected Intel to try to move x86 users to a new CPU, Itanium as it turned out, and that would break the x86 lock and allow buyers to consider other non-x86 alternatives. I believe you are making the same mistake. Consider that the x86 architecture is really a facade, that underneath this facade Intel is free to change from one modern RISC design to another, or to whatever is next, allowing them to increase performance without breaking compatibility. On the fly translation of x86 operations into RISC micro-ops combined with reordering and other technologies is going to be far harder to overcome than you suggest.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[deander2]

> single-accumulator, register-poor architecture

"single-accumulator" hasn't been true since the 286, IIRC. x86-64 has 16 general purpose registers, any of which can be used for accumulators. (not VLIW-ish in register count, but not shabby either) but even x86-32 could use multiple registers as accumulators, albeit with some operations requiring an extra micro-op.

> byzantine, non-orthagonal instruction set

it's my understanding that the instruction set *is* orthagonal, unless you're executing 8080 or 8086 instructions...

Re:Apple "locked in" to x86

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone pointed out a while back that if you had a RISC instruction set and wanted to compress the instruction stream to reduce code footprint, and were willing to pay a hardware price for the decoding logic, you could do worse than x86 as the compressed format. Not to say that it was planned or designed that way, of course, just that it's not completely without advantages over more elegant instruction sets.

Plus oh yeah backward compatibility, which is the only thing that matters in the real world.

Re:Apple does not have billions of lines of ARM co

[LarsG]

Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.

Due to economies of scale, Apple must choose hardware with somewhat similar production volumes as the most popular hardware platform in that category. For desk-/laptop, that means x86. If you remember, Apple dropped PPC because of lower production volumes which translated to less R&D and cutting edge fab investments, which in turn led to PPC falling behind x86 in price/performance. On the handheld/ultramobile side, any new hardware platform will have to compete with the large existing ARM market (and soon the well-funded and x86 compatible Intel Atom). Unless Apple can get economies of scale within shouting distance of the most prevalent hardware platform in a given category, they will be in for an expensive lesson in how "obsolete" the "platform wars" are.

Not to mention that while Apple might be hardware agnostic, 3rd party software isn't.

Anyway.. they bought a chip design company that specializes in high performance low power network storage server chips, not mobile/laptop chips. In the short term nothing is likely to come from this except perhaps a hefty upgrade in the next XServe RAID.