Apple to Acquire Chip Designer P.A. Semi for $278 Million

backdraft said:

No its not sarcasm. X86 is flakey, and OS X runs much more stable on PPC. Its a brand new box. No reason for the OS to feel unresponsive its an 8 core for pete's sake. On my old Powerbook G4 at 1.67ghz single core I don't get the hiccup's that I do on the Xeon's.
The X86 ISA is garbage. What IBM has in POWER is light years ahead of Intel. .

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Intel designs have never been great shakes but they have great fabrication-- fast, cheap, and can ramp up volume far better than anyone in the world. And that has been proven over the years to matter better than great design.

backdraft said:

No reason Apple can't have 2 architectures. .

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Yes, there is. It's called "software compatibility". It would surely do wonders for Apple's bottom line to take their software support and development costs and multiply by two.

Gasu E. said:

Intel designs have never been great shakes but they have great fabrication-- fast, cheap, and can ramp up volume far better than anyone in the world. And that has been proven over the years to matter better than great design.

Yes, there is. It's called "software compatibility". It would surely do wonders for Apple's bottom line to take their software support and development costs and multiply by two.

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Cheap is in for the US, one reason Coke changed from sugar to sweetener at the expense of taste.

If it is slightly worse and cheaper, the consumers will buy it.

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Not only supporting multiples a pain for a company, but supporting a single one by yourself. Apple tried being the main user of a chip and it didn't go well for the PPC.

Which is why I see Apple selling some variant to the market at large and not hording a single chip for themselves.

Think of it this way using iPods as an example -- if you have 70% of the market are you happy with your chip business only supplying only 70% of the market.

Or would you like to make even more money and capture a significant share and supply chips to the a big chunk of other 30% also ...

Hey guys, in 4 years time Apple will have released new iPhones with a chip that they custom designed, as well as an Apple tablet, called the iPad. the tablet is a beast. Dual core at 1.4ghz each and quad core graphics. And then they shrunk down the iPad and calls it iPad mini with worse internals 1ghz dual core and quad core graphics, but slower architecture. You heard it here first.

I love the bump. Quite genius.