I highly doubt apple would make the decision to spend millions to fab a new chip design without factoring in the costs and what they plan to do with that chip/design. Whatever they have planned will likely make this choice profitable and not dumb. So lets not jump to baseless conclusions when we have no idea what apple's plans really are.
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A5 Chip in Tweaked Apple TV Still Manufactured by Samsung at 32nm
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I highly doubt apple would make the decision to spend millions to fab a new chip design without factoring in the costs and what they plan to do with that chip/design. Whatever they have planned will likely make this choice profitable and not dumb. So lets not jump to baseless conclusions when we have no idea what apple's plans really are.
It most likely isn't a waste of time because somebody had to think about the fact that it costs millions to spin a new chip.
We don't know exactly why a single core A5 is being made. But it's likely a testbed for some sort of design decision.
Companies in the chip business do this all the time. In fact, the low prices we get for one category of chips are entirely due to this.
The volume we get out of the memory chips is mostly because memory is a testbed for tweaking chip fabrication processes.
Why? Because memory arrays are uniform. It's literally doing the same structure billions of times per die. You can literally see how reliably reproducible your fab results are when your entire wafer is covered in the exact same stuff.
Anyway, there's a new chip. We don't know why. But they're trying something.
