Apple Buys a Chip Company for $278M 322
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."
Re:Efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that is quite right. If you go to their website and have a look at the documents for their reference design, it's all about high performance embedded applications. I'd expect to see these in comms applications... or purpose built high speed data handling. But not phones or PDAs or things like that.
Expertise (Score:5, Insightful)
There are all sorts of things that Apple could be looking at this for Apple TV, iPhone, Tablet's, Apple EEPC/Macbook Air, Newton, iPod or even something different.
But at the same time they like to work with Intel on chip designs. They had one specially made for the Macbook Air. Besides the implied threat of an ability to go their own way they might find that collaborating with Intel on design may give them a massive say in the ultra-low power chips end up.
Without directly using PA Semi chips they could use PA semi to improve their own power consumption. Ultimately, $278m isn't actually that much money given the importance of low power performance to Apple across most of their product line.
Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
When you are in Apple's position, you leave the semiconductor development to others and let them battle it out to make the best component at the best price.
This was stupid.
Hardware Company (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs is obviously a fanatic about design and as time goes on, we'll see more and more "vertical integration" like this. Also remember that Apple is growing and is relatively flush with cash.
This is perhaps a very solid investment (bean counting as it were), outside the realm of design, software, hardware, and other technical matters.
Re:Obvious ADVANTAGE by Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
PA Semi is fabless. Other companies will be battling it out to make them.
But Apple gets to design chips to perfectly match the features they want in upcoming iPhones, without allowing the competitors to follow quickly behind by buying the same chip.
Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
This company that they bought simply licenses the Power architecture from IBM, and then makes manufacturing/design changes to make the chips more energy efficient. They make a dual-core 2GHz power chip with 2MB of cache, and integrated DDR2 controller with DMA controller... burning just 5-13W. AFAIK, no one else is making anything similar. Atom seems similar on the x86 side, but is larger and does not have the same features.
If Apple gained the ability to produce a product that others cannot match, then the move was not stupid. If Apple bought a commodity chip maker, then the move was stupid. They can always spin it back off if the product becomes a commodity.
Re:PowerPC Makes Sense for Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
This purchase probably has more to do with the embedded market which has been ignored by Intel because of low margins. There are plenty of chips other than a CPU that go into computers/electronics
Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they have something really, really specific in mind that the market can't provide.
Remember, macs had SCSI despite the expense because the market had nothing that did anything similar available at the time. They had SCSI until peripheral busses like Firewire and USB arrived, at which point they dumped it like a dead rat. See also their long string of proprietary monitor connectors - the 25-pin mac standard, Applevision, ACD - the latter two of which provide essentially the same functionality for two different generations of technology.
In my experience, Apple's the kind of company who's willing to let other companies make the bits (including software), if the bits do what they need. If they can't get anything useful from third parties, they will make it themselves. The best example there (after the Mac itself) would be software - MP3 players on MacOS were unstable, crash-prone winamp clones until Apple bought an audio software company and then iTunes came along.... and entry level through prosumer (and even pro, depending on who you talk to) video editing on the mac SUCKED ASS until Apple bought a chunk of video editing software and twisted it into the awesome that is Final Cut Pro.
Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid ahead my be smart behind (Score:3, Insightful)
This was stupid.
But what if Apple just denied all other small device makers the use of a chip that's three times more efficient than the competition?
Then Apple has the best chip, that no-one else can have at any price...
It's easy to say something looks stupid now, but without the roadmap for the company and for Apple you are just guessing. And Apple has a record of making smart choices, especially in the last few years. Therefore, we can reasonably say it's way more likely your pronouncement is of the "iPod Lame" sort that SLashdot is so famous for.
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell do they not have the resources?
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs just felt let down by the guys at IBM and Freescale when he wanted a chip that did this in this power envelope and they gave him THAT, 6 months or a year late.
There is no way you will find a PowerPC processor in an Apple mobile device like iPod or iPhone. It just doesn't make any sense to try and shoehorn PPC into a market where it's never gained a foothold. It's true that the only reason PPC isn't there right now is because nobody wants to throw away billions of lines of ARM code, ARM binaries and ARM support with ARM operating systems after 10 years of using ARM, but that just makes it harder to change. Apple don't have that "legacy" (after all they run MacOS X on the iPhone, and MacOS X is already done for PPC..) but I still think it would be a wasteful thing to buy a company like PASemi and roll them into doing in-house iPhone chips. iPhone is about as cheap and power-friendly as it's going to get for a long time, so there is no point expending all these resources on a PPC iPhone.
Of course if they bought one out I'd be first in line; just I think it's unlikely.
PASemi's big markets are currently in the server storage market. I think this is more likely to be a play for the next XServe RAID, SAN software and even to bop IBM on the head given the release of POWER6. If you can't afford or justify a POWER6 system, you could probably buy an Apple PASemi rack with 16-64 cores per 1U for a fraction of the price (and greater aggregate performance).
What is missing here is some sense on the part of the news reporters, who obviously don't understand the difference between highly embedded portable devices and a low power consumption network processor. PASemi certainly do NOT specialise in low power chips for "small devices", they specialise in low power chips for *communications infrastructure* like storage, advanced image processing, cryptography and the like. I am finding it hard to imagine that a chip with capability to support 10Gbe ports and a huge amount of comms bandwidth, transitions to "it's the next iPod processor".
Re:odd. (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted Apple might have just been using PA to leverage against Intel, but if the guy's at PA thought for sure Apple was going to pick them for the desktop they must have a fairly competitive product in the pipeline.
Apple does not have billions of lines of ARM code (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't have much in the way of ARM code at all, to the extent that nearly all of their ARM code is generated by a compiler. Apple has C and Objective C code, and has LLVM [llvm.org] sitting between the hardware and the Apple application source code. Apple can run on any hardware platform they like. They can support more than one hardware platform at almost negligible marginal cost. While the rest of the industry flails about, with their obsolete notions of "platform wars", Apple can simultaneously participate on the industry standards platform (or platforms as the case happens to be) and also invent a better platform, for one or many other product categories. Those can also overlap.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
Re:PowerPC Makes Sense for Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say it's not practical for a company Apple's size to maintain dual platforms. The support, the engineering, the logistics, etc. It's one thing to develop on dual platforms; it's another thing to actually have 2 product lines. Also the main reason Apple switched to Intel had to do with supply and logistics. There was no way that IBM or Motorola (which are large companies) was going to keep Apple supplied with enough custom PPC chips when changes in forecast occurred. It wasn't economical for either company to dedicate a large amount of resources to keep one small customer happy.
Re:x86 is not inefficient! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a gross distortion of reality. PowerPC always did up through the G4, and the G5 comes close as well. I'd consider the G5 a pretty modern desktop processor. Yeah, it uses a handful of instructions that are cracked or microcoded, but those are the exception, not the rule, and it is easy to build fully-functional code that doesn't use any microcoded instructions. With x86-derived CPUs, microcoded instructions are the rule, and it is almost impossible to write working code that isn't heavily microcoded in the CPU....
I think you mean instruction cache. Instead of the instruction cache, though, you now have truckloads of glue logic to split those instructions back into their RISC form internally. You only think you're saving die space by going CISC.... The only thing you really save by going CISC is disk space/RAM to hold the code, and since that's usually tiny compared to the size of data, that's just not a particularly important savings....
There are plenty of valid objective reasons to switch away from x86. The people arguing that RISC was inherently better than CISC weren't wrong; the people building the CISC architectures simply had orders of magnitude more R&D money to throw at the problem. While it is amazing that Intel has been able to wring as much performance as they have out of the x86 ISA, it is still important to note that modern x86 CPUs are basically RISC CPUs with massive microcode engines and cache wrapped around them. It should therefore be plainly obvious that if we used that underlying RISC instruction set directly instead of the CISC wrapper ISA, we could get rid of a huge chunk of the die size, representing a huge power win, a huge thermal win, a huge manufacturing cost win, and a huge manufacturing yield win, all without changing the actual performance of the chip in the slightest, memory bandwidth for instruction prefetch notwithstanding....
Of course, my comments here are all about the x86 architecture in the long run. Eventually, Windows (or at least 32-bit Windows) will be a footnote in computer history. When that happens---when only application emulation (rather than OS emulation) is needed to maintain backwards compatibility---the x86 architecture's legacy support will no longer be as critical as it is now, and we will likely see it start to fall away as legacy cruft inevitably does. In the short term, though, that legacy compatibility is still at least moderately useful, so the industry puts up with the x86 ISA....
Just my $0.02.
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no real advantage to using the current PASemi line-up for AppleTV or Mac Mini for those ends, and adding the components to shore it up to those requirements would take 18 months at least. At the very least. To what benefit? The current models work just fine.
More likely they have a plan for PA6T in server and storage, and will tap the company for talent in improving the iPhone such as a custom ARM SoC which does *exactly* what they want and not much else would be good - not better performing and probably not better power consumption as XScale already has those design goals sewn up, but if they can reduce the iPhone and iPod Touch to a single chip, that would be a cost goal and enable them to include more flash storage for the same price.
But mostly my bet is it's for servers and storage to start. Then Apple will branch into designing everything that doesn't come from Intel.
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:5, Insightful)
IA64 uses EFI, but MS won't adopt EFI for IA32 until PCs are all EFI, probably Windows 7 in 2010 (if it's on time, hehe). That's another three years of core compatibility failure between the two platforms.
Also, 64bit x86 and 32bit x86 are similarly binary incompatible because of MS' engineering decisions.
Mac OS X is not only 64bit and EFI savvy, but there's no problem running the same software on 32/64 bit hardware, and there's even a smooth ramp between the PPC/Intel platforms. Apple even has their OS running on ARM, rather than a seperate "mobile version" that uses an entirely different kernel design, as MS did with WinCE.
So despite MS' mid 90s efforts to make NT cross platform, it was never really accomplished in a workable way (no equivalent to the late 80s NeXTSTEP running on all those platforms, nor the modern Universal Binary Apple is using), and that's why MS couldn't sustain it.
Saying there was "no real demand" for cross platform support is a bit silly. You could also say Bob was excellent, and just lacked "enough demand." There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD.
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent [roughlydrafted.com]
Re:Apple will ditch intel (Score:3, Insightful)