Apple With Specific Plans for P.A. Semi

[MacRumors]

EETimes provides a little background to the recent acquisition of P.A. Semi by Apple.

According to their source, Apple had already been an investor of the company and had previously been in negotiations with it for low-power PowerPC chips. Apple's switch to Intel, of course, ended these talks and eliminated a potentially large revenue stream from the company.

More recently, Apple is said to have had a new chip design in mind and wanted the P.A. Semi team involved. According to EETimes, P.A. Semi had essentially run out of funding and "the only way to get the project funded was for Apple to pay off the other investors and bring P.A. Semi in-house."

As a result, the $280 million acquisition was to bring their talent in for this new project rather than any specific technologies P.A. Semi had already developed. This explanation is consistent with early statements from P.A. Semi to their existing customers that the company was bought for "intellectual property and engineering talent".


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[gphoto]

Sounds awesome! What ever they come up with will be amazing!

 

[pederg]

Good to know that we'll be staying with intel for a while Shame that we miss out on the PowerBook G5 tho..

 

[twoodcc]

well i hope they are a good help to Apple. i wonder what this new chip will be?

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

It will be interesting to watch this develop and see where it goes.

 

[swagi]

Yes please!

Gimme back the PPC feeling. Honestly, those Intel iMacs (Core Duo first iteration) really feel bad. The lasting appeal deteriorated so much. For the first time in my Mac life I experience regular system freezes with leaving Safari open for more than 24 hrs.

My PB G4 feels so good in contrast. I fear upgrading to an Intel machine, as at least those iMacs I have behave a bit...let me say...strange!

PPC was a glorious time, so here is to hoping that Universal binaries will stay!

Granted Parallels and Boot Camp are awesome and wouldn't run on PPC.

 

[deputy_doofy]

Hmmm. Apple gets PA Semi to design a chip that is sort of a PPC/x86 hybrid. Intel then runs with the design for their new Core 4.
Runs all the current stuff today - OS X, WinXP/Vista/9x, Linux, etc. However, due to the extra stuff, Apple gets a bit of the revenue from the chips IF used by other companies (HP, Dell, Alienware, etc.), otherwise, Apple pays for the chips since Intel still has to create them.

Cool. Yes. I just made that up. May Fools == me.

 

[inkswamp]

Good to know that we'll be staying with intel for a while Shame that we miss out on the PowerBook G5 tho..

The poor PowerBook G5. Its "next Tuesday" just never came.

So not to derail the PA Semi discussion too much with wild-*ss speculation, but let's connect a few dots.

1. PA Semi has experience making PPC chips.

2. Apple believes PA Semi has talent to do something great with the PPC (presumably).

3. Apple has signaled an interest in games lately.

4. XBox 360 and Wii are both powered by PPC processors.

Hmm....

 

[RedTomato]

My PB G4 feels so good in contrast. I fear upgrading to an Intel machine, as at least those iMacs I have behave a bit...let me say...strange!

I went from a PB15 1.5ghz to a MB C2D, and the change is amazing. It's many times faster, and the dual core goodness is fantastic.

It does need lots of RAM - my MB C2D was **terrible** on 1GB, but flies on 4GB. Fortunately RAM is dirt cheap at the moment so go for it.

Moving to a new architecture is full of pitfalls, and at the same time as a new OSX Leopard is just asking for trouble. I fully expected the first few Intel revs to be buggy as **** and avoided them for this reason. And I avoided the first few 10.5.x releases too.

I only bought my MB once it moved to C2D, GMA X3100, and 10.5.1 (or.2), meaning that every component was on at least its second revision.

The new MBs coming out soon, along with 10.5.3 are finally becoming a mature product.

 

[BornAgainMac]

A-Box 360 from Apple. Hey Microsoft, how do you like being copied?

 

[JG271]

Good to see that apple are making their own chips!

1. PA Semi has experience making PPC chips.

2. Apple believes PA Semi has talent to do something great with the PPC (presumably).

3. Apple has signaled an interest in games lately.

4. XBox 360 and Wii are both powered by PPC processors.

Hmm....

Although PA semi have usually made small, power efficient chips though - less need for them in a gaming machine - however - apple cover most of the tech gadgets spectrum, apart from gaming...

 

[arn]

The poor PowerBook G5. Its "next Tuesday" just never came.

So not to derail the PA Semi discussion too much with wild-*ss speculation, but let's connect a few dots.

1. PA Semi has experience making PPC chips.

while true, I think PA Semi's experience is making low-power PPC chips, so they do have some skill that could be useful for portable devices that could translate beyond PPC.

I took a look through their patents but it was a bit technical, so I was unable to get anything out of it.

arn

 

[sk8mash]

Interesting stuff...i wonder whats coming...

Anyway, a bit of an error...

P.A. Semi had essentially run out of funding and and "the only way to get the project funded was for Apple to pay off the other investors and bring P.A. Semi in-house."

 

[ChrisA]

People here keep thinking the a CPU chip is the only kind of chip. Open up any Mac and look inside. Count those little black square things that are soldered to the PCB and notice that the non-CPU chips greatly outnumber the CPU chips. If you want to make the device smaller, cheaper and use less power, even if the CPU were zero-size you don't save much. We all know that a Mac's mainboard is many times larger than a CPU.

I'm sure what Apple would like is to be able to greatly reduce the nuber of non-CPU chips. Doing this is the only way to greatly reduce the size of a maniboard. but you can only do that if you have the abilty to do chip-level design.

I think it is clear that Apple knows that a small designer can't really compete with Intel when it comes to CPUs. They did not Buy PA Semi so that they can build better comonity chips, They bought them to design custom lowvolume device specific chips

I think these might find their way into products like the Apple TV or the iPod.

 

[swagi]

I went from a PB15 1.5ghz to a MB C2D, and the change is amazing. It's many times faster, and the dual core goodness is fantastic.

It does need lots of RAM - my MB C2D was **terrible** on 1GB, but flies on 4GB. Fortunately RAM is dirt cheap at the moment so go for it.

Moving to a new architecture is full of pitfalls, and at the same time as a new OSX Leopard is just asking for trouble. I fully expected the first few Intel revs to be buggy as **** and avoided them for this reason. And I avoided the first few 10.5.x releases too.

I only bought my MB once it moved to C2D, GMA X3100, and 10.5.1 (or.2), meaning that every component was on at least its second revision.

The new MBs coming out soon, along with 10.5.3 are finally becoming a mature product.

Thanx for the advice! I will upgrade sooner or later and I hear you.

I think I'll wait for the Nehalem MBP in about 9 months from now. But then I'll give it a go!

 

[deputy_doofy]

I went from a PB15 1.5ghz to a MB C2D, and the change is amazing. It's many times faster, and the dual core goodness is fantastic.

It does need lots of RAM - my MB C2D was **terrible** on 1GB, but flies on 4GB. Fortunately RAM is dirt cheap at the moment so go for it.

Moving to a new architecture is full of pitfalls, and at the same time as a new OSX Leopard is just asking for trouble. I fully expected the first few Intel revs to be buggy as **** and avoided them for this reason. And I avoided the first few 10.5.x releases too.

I only bought my MB once it moved to C2D, GMA X3100, and 10.5.1 (or.2), meaning that every component was on at least its second revision.

The new MBs coming out soon, along with 10.5.3 are finally becoming a mature product.

I went from a PB 12" (1GHz, 512MB RAM) to a MBP (See sig). The difference is night and day. Throw out the notion that Intel is the bad guy. Pentium 4s were crap and highly inefficient, but the Core 2s are very nice.

 

[aLoC]

Apple has a chip idea? Surprising, but they must think it's a good one to buy an entire semiconductor company to try and implement it.

 

[CaptainScarlet]

while true, I think PA Semi's experience is making low-power PPC chips, so they do have some skill that could be useful for portable devices that could translate beyond PPC.
arn

I would have to agree that the "PPC" isn't necessarily the point here. The patents and or the technology for the low watt chips are.

If Intel can't design the same type of chip, I'd suspect that PA Semi will design the chip and Intel will produce it (as someone stated before).

This all probably revolves around battery life.....

 

[KindredMAC]

The beauty of Universal Binary is that Apple can slap whatever chip they want into a Mac and everything will run perfectly.

Keeps the door open without having to commit to staying at Intel's house party in the event that IBM's Power6/7's party starts rocking the neighborhood and looks more enticing to be the place to be.

Still prefer the PPC over the X86 chips.... just me though.

Still never understood why the PowerMac couldn't have stuck around but with a Power6 chip in it instead of a XEON chip. I miss the name "PowerMac" also. Mac Pro just doesn't sound as awe-inspiring.

 

[aLoC]

This all probably revolves around battery life.....

I agree. Nearly anything that can be done on a custom chip can be done in software on a general purpose chip, so if they are doing a custom chip it must be for efficiency reasons, whether that be battery life or pure performance I don't know.

 

[dukeblue91]

I think it's a chip that will go into every Mac computer and that will be the only way OS 10.6 will run.
Perfect solution for fending off those pesky osx86 wannabe companies in the future.

Apple made Apple controlled.

 

[DaBrain]

well i hope they are a good help to Apple. i wonder what this new chip will be?

Yep! I sure was wondering just what this special chip may be used for and what platform or product Apple is planning on implementing them? Very Interesting!

For them to invest $250 million plus IM sure Apple plans on reaping mucho profits from this chip production down the road. Guess only time will tell!

 

[wordmunger]

The bad news: Your company has been acquired
The good news: You still have a job
The bad news: You now have the pickiest, crankiest boss on the planet

 

[eddietr]

I think it's a chip that will go into every Mac computer and that will be the only way OS 10.6 will run.
Perfect solution for fending off those pesky osx86 wannabe companies in the future.

Apple made Apple controlled.

They could do that very easily without buying a chip company. Basically you're talking about an integrated dongle (remember those?)

I think this is either one or both of the following:

(a) Apple wants to continue what they already started with the MBA, which is a real reduction in size and power consumption of Mac motherboards. What Intel can do with the CPUs is just part of that equation.

(b) Apple wants to build a next generation mobile chipsets that will consume less power than the chipsets they are forced to choose from today. Remember other than the CPU, the iPhone also uses off the shelf parts for communicating with the phone network. And this puts real limitations on the iPhone capabilities and design (and battery life). My guess is that some people at Apple or PA Semi think they build a better solution themselves. In other words, this is step one to a really thin iPhone and/or an iPhone nano and/or a really interesting umpc or small tablet.

 

[DaBrain]

I think it's a chip that will go into every Mac computer and that will be the only way OS 10.6 will run.
Perfect solution for fending off those pesky osx86 wannabe companies in the future.

Apple made Apple controlled.

That's not a bad idea! Much better than Micro Sloth Genuine Advantage.