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."

Obvious move for Apple

[morgan_greywolf]

Apple is increasing moving into embedded and mobile markets more and more with iPhone, iPod, etc. I think we're going to start to see more small footprint devices from Apple in the future, maybe even something that creates a whole new product category. Information-based devices and appliances are the future, and Apple is one of the companies poised to do great things in this market.

This is a precursor to some big things and I think Apple is taking itself in an entirely new direction.

Just me $0.02.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[Watson Ladd]

Unlikely. They already had PPC processors on the desktop and didn't like them. I think this is geared towards mobile devices like the iPod and iPhone which are not Intel chips. But if Apple gets PPC chips from a vendor who cares about portable computing (like Apple itself) they just might switch back to take advantage of the negative compiler optimization hit on PPC.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[somersault]

I doubt that at this point in time. This chip company specialises in low power chips for small devices, not desktop chips. Though introducing a super efficient desktop processor would be nice. 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. Would be nice if Microsoft took up the challenge..

One bright little commenter on El Reg suggested that another reason for Apple buying this company could be for a console release, as Apple recently acquired a patent which could be for console gaming. [reghardware.co.uk]

Efficiency

[Upphew]

5 to 13 watts at 2GHz? And 100 cycles per command? What kind of range is that "5 to 13"? And obligatory car analogy: 20 to 52MPG seems rather large deviation...

odd.

[bhima]

I'm very curious where Apple is going with this. P.A. Semi so far has only put information about one design up on their website and it's been there at least since the rumor that Apple was going to buy them (shortly before they went to Intel). That chip, being somewhere between Atom & Core2 I suppose, doesn't seem to me to good fit to any of Apple's existing products.

The idea that hidden up their sleeves P.A. Semi has an ultra efficient SOC design for a next generation iPhone/iPod/Tablet is sort of interesting but I'd be really surprised if a dark horse came out nowhere and outdid the various upcoming Intel offerings or even the existing ARM SOC designs. Intel is very, very proud of their Low Voltage and Ultra Low Voltage parts but surely that added cost doesn't make it worth Apple's while to go out a buy a company.

The idea that P.A. Semi has a next generation chip suitable workstation or home computer applications for me is even more unlikely. I think it would have to some chip to really motivate Apple to go away from Intel for their Mac lines.

Re:A blow to ARM?

[TheRaven64]

And, looking at Dan Dobberpuhl's biography, he was also a design leader on the StrongARM project, so it's not like he doesn't have experience designing ARM cores...

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[somersault]

Well, they do have the iPod and the iPhone, that's a good base for starting a handheld games console at least. Maybe they'll turn the iPod into a more gaming capable device *shrug*

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[somersault]

Not directly maybe, but if they use the already established iPod brand as a base for handheld gaming, they could do okay. I'm not saying they will or should, but the fact that they have applied for a patent for "Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games" ( http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77388864 [uspto.gov] ), suggests that they are thinking about it. There isn't much competition in handheld gaming at the moment, it's the DS or the PSP. If Apple started selling games on iTunes direct to iPods then they could do pretty well. The DS and Wii have shown that you just need a gimmick.. uh.. I mean.. oh whatever (note: I'm only kidding, I have both a DS and a Wii, they're good systems, though most of the games I've bought for them are a bit short or lacking sufficient depth to keep me interested). I think it's quite likely that Apple are seriously considering competing in the mobile gaming arena since they're basically dominating the media player arena, and have made a decent attempt at entry into the mobile communications arena..

Random Note: I don't want an iPod or iPhone, and I don't see myself wanting one anytime soon. I also think iTunes sucks as a media player. I have however always liked Apple's actual computers, and I am happy to see them succeed in other areas as long as it spurs on development of their desktop and laptop machines...

PowerPC Makes Sense for Apple

[BBCWatcher]

I've always wondered why Steve Jobs didn't announce a dual-architecture strategy from the get-go. But perhaps that was the plan all along, and Apple simply needed to announce "Intel only" to get all their developers moved as quickly as possible to universal binaries. Now that Microsoft and Adobe, the last holdouts, have complied, Apple can go back to a dual (or even tri, with iPhone's ARM) architecture approach, choosing the right processor core for the right device and maximizing its flexibility and distinctiveness.

For example, the PowerPC core would be perfect for AppleTV and possibly a new Mac nano, where the cost of an Intel chip simply doesn't make sense. Apple is probably losing money on every AppleTV box right now. Every universal binary already runs on PowerPC, so all the applications and development ecosystem are already in place. The fact VMware and Parallels don't run on PowerPC is a feature, not a bug: Apple can wean some more users away from Microsoft Windows as certain devices hit the market and get some better market segmentation. Users who want Intel can buy Intel, and users who want alternative form factors, alternative power consumption profiles, lower cost, and/or new device categories can get PowerPC under the hood and still run the full Mac OS X portfolio of software. And having their own chip company helps keep Intel honest. Apple probably didn't like Intel's forced march from Santa Rosa to Penryn. That was inconsistent with Apple's longer product cycles. And all the game consoles are PowerPC-based, so that could be appealing if Apple ever wants to entice some game developers over to some of their devices. (Games do tend to work down on the iron.) IBM continues to underwrite PowerPC for its own server lines and has cranked up POWER6 to 5.0 GHz in its servers, way beyond Intel's best, so it's still an architecture with a lot of interesting advantages.

Single chip devices

[Fzz]

With the iPhone, iPod, and so on, to save power and keep prices down you really want system-on-a-chip designs. But if you buy commodity, then you get the same system-on-a-chip everyone else can get. It's hard to do something different. For desktop machines, you can distinguish yourself by the combination of features (even though Apple machines aren't that different to anyone elses these days, except possibly for firewire), but you can't do that in the embedded/mobile space if cost and power dictate it's a single chip design. So, my guess is they want their own in-house capability to build system-on-a-chip designs that are different from everyone else. Different in what way though, I have no idea.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[Anonymous Coward]

(replying AC because I've already modded in this thread)

Yes, the hardware is modern. The problem with x86 is the ridiculous single-accumulator, register-poor architecture, coupled with that byzantine, non-orthagonal instruction set. Say what you will about shadow registers and prefetch caches, the fact is that x86 is 1970's technology running on 2000 hardware.

Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple

[cowscows]

It's debatable. There have been plenty of people who've said that if they were in Apple's position, they'd license the Mac OS and let others battle it out to make the hardware. That would be a seriously foolish move for Apple partly because they make so much money off of hardware, but also because one of their main design philosophies is designing the whole "widget". Apple seems to really like being in direct control of as many pieces of their products as they can. I bet if they thought they could realistically design and manufacture their own CPUs, they'd do that to.

Maybe they've got something in mind but that they don't think they can convince different chip makers to move in that direction. They've just got a ton of cash laying around, maybe they felt like taking a little risk is worth it to get certain types of chips that they really want. This isn't Apple just blindly jumping into an industry that they have no idea about. There's got to be a specific reason for this.

Two Words

[Yvan256]

Universal Binary.

Hey, you never know.

Before you say "Apple will never do that", let me remind you of some things we all heard before:
- Apple will never release a low-cost computer
- Apple will never make a music player
- Apple will never enter the cellphone market
- Apple will never dump support for Mac OS classic
- Apple will never switch to Intel

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

You didn't read what I wrote. As I said, NT is portable. The current code isn't all based on NT -- much of it is new, and they didn't bother with portability the way Dave Cutler did for NT. What you're operating on here is very outdated knowledge -- there's a very good reason why the Early XBOX 360 kits were running NT 4 and not 2000 or XP.

(BTW--My knoweldge comes from individuals inside Microsoft, so I know it's accurate.)

Re:Thank God

[MightyYar]

Why did Apple do it?

I love to speculate! :)

Maybe they want to release a PPC Mac (maybe as a set-top or something) just to keep price and development pressure on Intel? If there is a new PPC Mac in the field, software vendors might feel compelled to continue shipping universal binaries instead of going Intel-only.

The problem with my little hypothesis there is that Intel already has price pressure from AMD on the laptop/desktop and the various ARM players on the embedded front.

So here's a better hypothesis: These guys have figured out a manufacturing process to take hungry chips and make them into thrifty chips. Apple would have loved their dual-Power chip that uses 5 or so watts back before the switch to Intel. The G4 that they had in their laptops never got anywhere near that, and ran at a slower clock-speed, and was single-core! Even if they never make another "Mac" with PPC, they might use this technology to adapt other cores - or release a OSX-based non-Mac product (like they have with the iPhone, iPod, and AppleTV).

Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple

[poot_rootbeer]

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.

The semiconductor industry is really only interested in creating the best "general-purpose" semiconductor. If a hardware company like Apple has specific or divergent needs, their choices are to pay through the nose to "partner" with a chipmaker to accommodate their requirements (if they can find one willing), or to buy a chipmaker outright and do whatever they want.

Apple doesn't want to be stuck in the situation they were just a few years ago, needing IBM to improve the PowerPC so their business could move forward, but finding IBM uninterested in investing the effort because it wasn't profitable enough to them.

Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple

[bestinshow]

The odd thing is that it is a POWER instruction set CPU. Whilst I know that Apple are flexible, it seems an odd move.

Far more likely is that Apple want them to design a 2GHz dual-core ARM compatible CPU. Depending on the design of their current CPUs, it could be possible that this work could just affect a relatively small part of the overall CPU (although still a lot of work).

Then again, why not move to using POWER in Apple's mobile devices instead of ARM... hmm.

It's less than 2% of Apple's savings, and I believe the company already has clients and sales so it could just be a good investment in the long term.

Re:Obvious ERROR by Apple

[LKM]

Well, if you own a large percentage of a market, and that market requires a specific type of processor, then you're essentially - by buying large quantities of it - paying for this processor's development anyway, thus subsidising your competition.

Also, if you have a chip that is better than everyone else's, and you own that chip, that's a huge competitive advantage.

I'm not saying this is the case here. Just saying that there may be sound reasons for a move such as Apple's.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[nbritton]

It would be nice if you could directly access the RISC core on modern x86 processors. I think the reason Intel doesn't want to do this is so they can change the internal guts whenever they feel like it.

Wonder how Sun and SGI feel

[menace3society]

There was a lot of talk a while back of Apple buying up Sun or SGI, or having a merger, which would enable them to muscle into the hard-core server market, soup up their unix-based OS, and get a ton of chip-level hardware wizards on board. Now knowing that this is basically impossible, I wonder if execs at those two now also-rans are getting ready to byte the bullet or bail out.

Re:Apple will ditch intel

[c_forq]

Really? Sony Ericsson not only has a bigger marketshare, faster growth, but it's revenue surpasses the revenues of all of Apple's divisions combined.

Are you sure about all this? Using data from Wikipedia I have Sony Ericsson's net income as 1.582 billion while Apples is listed as 3.5 billion. For Revenue I have Sony Ericsson at 17.389 billion compared to Apple's 24.01 billion. BTW, all numbers are in USD, and Sony Ericsson's numbers were figured using Google's exchange rate calculator.