Think of it this way: Tostitos is the only one that can make a chip shaped like a scoop. Now we get to see what Apple will do with the new smart processor guy to make the ULTIMATE chip.
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Apple's Plans for P.A. Semi? Not Interested in the Chips?
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Kwill
macrumors 68000
OT: Hackintoshes will not be able to touch Macintoshes when it comes to support and application integration. With each new OS, Apple makes this more apparent.
Disclaimer: Nobody really knows what S.P. Jobs is thinking; to outsiders, sometimes he may not himself seem to know.
Look at some obvious facts though. Apple is growing exponentially. A multiplicity of retail stores, international distribution of computers, iPods, and now a radically new platform on the iPhone, stretches inside talent to its limit. Witness the need last year to delay release of Leopard as engineers were reassigned to get iPhone ready.
More signs of growing pains: Over 200,000 iPhone application developers require considerable technical assistance. Intel is expanding multi-core processors from quads to 12's and beyond. Making compatible applications optimized for this and supporting the many Mac developers attempting to do the same means Apple needs a significantly larger staff. Enter PA Semi with 150 highly skilled employees pushing the envelope in power efficient multi-processor computers.
Apple does not want to further strain its existing talent pool with any secondary business model. Producing commodity items like chips for third parties will sap Apple of human and monetary resources - further hampering its own product releases. Intel spends billions on fabrication plants, R&D, and chip design. It appears prudent to harness core strengths by integrating the design talent from PA Semi into existing Apple growth opportunities.
Say hello to better technical support, on the phone, on-line, and within its own applications and hardware for the Macintosh platform and mobile devices such as the iPhone.
1.) On the DoD contracting topic, it could be that Apple wants some experience with THE largest consumer in the world. US federal government spends more than anyone else, Apple may want part of that pie. It is also good to note that the defense contracts just need to be completed as well, and Apple may not want any DoD experience.
2.) This chip manufacturer owns the power instruction set. Apple may want control of the instruction set to control phased development/elimination of the chips? I don't know what advantage that would have...
3.) As far as talent and IPR goes, Apple probably made a good move to better understand low power and multicore processing for mobile devices. Maybe a greater alliance with Intel in the future? The manufacturer's site indicates the chip materials are very green friendly, maybe that has some benefit?
2.) This chip manufacturer owns the power instruction set. Apple may want control of the instruction set to control phased development/elimination of the chips? I don't know what advantage that would have...
3.) As far as talent and IPR goes, Apple probably made a good move to better understand low power and multicore processing for mobile devices. Maybe a greater alliance with Intel in the future? The manufacturer's site indicates the chip materials are very green friendly, maybe that has some benefit?
Not really. First off the company is making money. So the $250M will be made back in so many years. It would only cost $250M if they bought it then fired everyone and burned the building down.
What Apple has decided here is that they intend to buy so much product from these guys that it would be better to buy the company.
I'm sure what will happen is nothing at first and Apple will ramp up their purchases from them until eventually Apple is the largest or maybe in the end only customer
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
No, I agree with Kwill on the point that Apple isn't about to start sourcing random chips to third parties. Apple brought a technology in house and they're not going to offset the small purchase cost by selling silicon. Microsoft would, but Apple won't.
I disagree with Kwill, however, on the idea that Apple only intends to staff up. Apple intends to use this group to do essentially what this group is doing now, but under Apple control. In other words: yesterday PA's business model was building dual 2GHz 64bit chips for blades and mobile devices. Today their business model is building quarter watt, 32bit chips for iPhone.
You don't buy a company because you were going to buy too much stuff from them-- you buy a company because you want to own them. You see what they have as a potential competitive advantage that you don't want others to have access too, and you want to combine your funding with their talent to customize their roadmap to your needs. "Remember how you didn't want to build a 4 core, 32bit, 500MHz variant of your chip? Now you want to. Oh, and we want hardware support for touchscreens."
Kwill
macrumors 68000
To quote the referenced EETimes article, "P.A. Semi customers were told the acquiring company was not interested in the startup's products or road map, but is buying the company for its intellectual property and engineering talent."
either no one has said this, or everyone is saying and I am missing it but...
this company has engineers that can make a chip 3x more energy efficient than regular chips. Apple has chips, intel chips. Maybe these guys will work with intel/modify intel chips. who knows...but the thing I was really interested in was...
they took an existing item and made it 3x more energy efficient. Put them on a product team to make products more energy efficient. I know a lot of apple parts can be bought "off the shelf". But what if they design a MB/MBP mobo 3x more energy efficient? wifi, 3g modules for iphone, power efficient "green" imacs, etc etc.?
I know they designed chips, but if your skills lay in making circuits and processors more energy efficient...it could maybe be applied to lots of things!
I have no EE experience btw, so I might be talking of that which I know not of.
this company has engineers that can make a chip 3x more energy efficient than regular chips. Apple has chips, intel chips. Maybe these guys will work with intel/modify intel chips. who knows...but the thing I was really interested in was...
they took an existing item and made it 3x more energy efficient. Put them on a product team to make products more energy efficient. I know a lot of apple parts can be bought "off the shelf". But what if they design a MB/MBP mobo 3x more energy efficient? wifi, 3g modules for iphone, power efficient "green" imacs, etc etc.?
I know they designed chips, but if your skills lay in making circuits and processors more energy efficient...it could maybe be applied to lots of things!
I have no EE experience btw, so I might be talking of that which I know not of.
wheezy
macrumors 65816
ichi
macrumors newbie
hmmm
I can't believe that Apple didn't snatch up Audible.com and instead let Amazon buy them. The price tag was almost as much as PA Semi ~300 million. I hope their "engineering talent" warrants the price tag...
I can't believe that Apple didn't snatch up Audible.com and instead let Amazon buy them. The price tag was almost as much as PA Semi ~300 million. I hope their "engineering talent" warrants the price tag...
ichi
macrumors newbie
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
Yeah, I know... Not to knock the high quality of EETimes' investigative journalists, but this sounds like something you tell customers so they stop trying to convince you they're different and that it would be in Apple's interest to sell them chips directly.
You don't pay a premium for a complete set of highly specialized engineers if you're just going to have them do motherboards. And the IP has no value if you don't intend to use it.
Apple at least intends to use these folks to make chips. Probably chips not to very different far afield from they were making before.
Buying Audible would have been an indication that Apple was getting into the content game. They're not going to shake up their content providers that way, at least not yet.
This is a great thing. IP is very huge gold mine.
With its partnership with intel and these new engineers apple has more man power and supplies to built better machines for the consumer.
With its partnership with intel and these new engineers apple has more man power and supplies to built better machines for the consumer.
This makes perfect sense to me. Apple has proven their ability to switch architectures on the fly without non-techie customers so much as noticing the change. I agree with earlier posters, this acquisition is to develop true mobile devices. Smaller than MBA so you can carry it with you everywhere, bigger than iPhone so you can use it for real work without squinting. I honestly can't wait to see it, but I hope that this locking down of the developers isn't an indication of the future direction. They used the mobile phone network as an excuse for the lock-down on the iPhone and people are buying into it... not a good sign. If that's the real reason, why isn't the iPod touch an open platform?!? Let's hope a true mobile device is treated more like a computer in that respect than a mobile phone.
Journalists are stupid
I've been screaming bloody murder about this all day. All the madness was created by the legions of brain-dead bloggers and "journalists" who were only interested in writing bold headlines of "APPLE BACKSTABS INTEL WITH CHIP COMPANY PURCHASE" and the equally mind-numbing "IPHONE SHUNS INTEL ATOM FOR POWERPC" and other such nonsense. I couldn't even believe how many article I saw who's authors were convinced Apple and Intel were done and they were going back to PPC, or how Apple was going to use current chips from the aquisition for the iPhone.
These people didn't even do the most BASIC of research or even THINK for that matter. I mean seriously, a 10-watt 2Ghz dual core POWER-based chip in the iPhone? Apple moving Macs to PowerPC and losing boot camp / virtualization? What are they smoking?
Anyways, I wrote in the other thread, but I'll rehash some comments here:
I believe the Intel switch was one of the best moves in Apple history. Intel's x86 processors are fast, efficient, and have a great future ahead, including the Q4 release of Nehalem. Most importantly, switching to Intel's platform has made possible Apple's current growth and success in the market.
1) Using X86 processors created the ability to use Bootcamp for dual-booting Windows Xp, and likewise run high-speed virtualization via VMware and Parallels. Don't underestimate the power of being able to slowly ween off of windows and run legacy windows applications. I would even argue that this fact alone is responsible for a huge percentage of conversions from windows.
2) Intel's processors gave Apple the opportunity to benefit from the economies of scale that result from the enormous worldwide x86 market. This allowed Apple to become much more price-competitive in the market versus the PC manufacturers, while at the same time keeping their margins high for profitability. There is no way they could maintain this cost advantage by going back to the POWER market, which is a tiny fraction of the size of the x86 market. This effect would only be magnified even more if they used some type of non-commodity, in-house processors made by their acquisition that were contract manufactured. At the same time, POWER may be popular for certain embedded product niches and for IBM's supercomputers, however most of the R&D money for laptop/desktop IC is going into x86 and this will not change anytime soon. Intel and AMD x86 products will dominate the scene for the foreseeable future.
As for the iPhone, as i mentioned above, PA Semi does not make low-power chips for small devices like smartphones or iPods. These processors use 50X more power than the iPhone does currently. Phone processors are measured in MILLIWATTS, not WATTS. Besides, the POWER architecture doesn't make ANY sense at all for the purpose. POWER was never designed to scale that low, sort of like x86, whereas the ARM architecture was created for just that purpose. With all the talk of switching to the future Menlow platform that has Intel's Silverthorne/Atom chip, I remind people to look at where ARM is heading.
The iPhone's ARM11 processor is by NO MEANS top of the line and current. ARM's new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 cores offer 2-3X the performance of the ARM11 with the same or lower power use. These chips are available as dual-core and scale to over 1Ghz, way more than adequate for any future iPhone. And these Cotex cores are the CURRENTLY available generation.
I agree with what you are saying, and it's not as much of a stretch as some may think that they could apply their knowledge to chips in Apple's iPhone or other platforms. Apparently, members of their team have worked on Intel's Itanium and ADM's Opterons.
I've been screaming bloody murder about this all day. All the madness was created by the legions of brain-dead bloggers and "journalists" who were only interested in writing bold headlines of "APPLE BACKSTABS INTEL WITH CHIP COMPANY PURCHASE" and the equally mind-numbing "IPHONE SHUNS INTEL ATOM FOR POWERPC" and other such nonsense. I couldn't even believe how many article I saw who's authors were convinced Apple and Intel were done and they were going back to PPC, or how Apple was going to use current chips from the aquisition for the iPhone.
These people didn't even do the most BASIC of research or even THINK for that matter. I mean seriously, a 10-watt 2Ghz dual core POWER-based chip in the iPhone? Apple moving Macs to PowerPC and losing boot camp / virtualization? What are they smoking?
Anyways, I wrote in the other thread, but I'll rehash some comments here:
I believe the Intel switch was one of the best moves in Apple history. Intel's x86 processors are fast, efficient, and have a great future ahead, including the Q4 release of Nehalem. Most importantly, switching to Intel's platform has made possible Apple's current growth and success in the market.
1) Using X86 processors created the ability to use Bootcamp for dual-booting Windows Xp, and likewise run high-speed virtualization via VMware and Parallels. Don't underestimate the power of being able to slowly ween off of windows and run legacy windows applications. I would even argue that this fact alone is responsible for a huge percentage of conversions from windows.
2) Intel's processors gave Apple the opportunity to benefit from the economies of scale that result from the enormous worldwide x86 market. This allowed Apple to become much more price-competitive in the market versus the PC manufacturers, while at the same time keeping their margins high for profitability. There is no way they could maintain this cost advantage by going back to the POWER market, which is a tiny fraction of the size of the x86 market. This effect would only be magnified even more if they used some type of non-commodity, in-house processors made by their acquisition that were contract manufactured. At the same time, POWER may be popular for certain embedded product niches and for IBM's supercomputers, however most of the R&D money for laptop/desktop IC is going into x86 and this will not change anytime soon. Intel and AMD x86 products will dominate the scene for the foreseeable future.
As for the iPhone, as i mentioned above, PA Semi does not make low-power chips for small devices like smartphones or iPods. These processors use 50X more power than the iPhone does currently. Phone processors are measured in MILLIWATTS, not WATTS. Besides, the POWER architecture doesn't make ANY sense at all for the purpose. POWER was never designed to scale that low, sort of like x86, whereas the ARM architecture was created for just that purpose. With all the talk of switching to the future Menlow platform that has Intel's Silverthorne/Atom chip, I remind people to look at where ARM is heading.
The iPhone's ARM11 processor is by NO MEANS top of the line and current. ARM's new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 cores offer 2-3X the performance of the ARM11 with the same or lower power use. These chips are available as dual-core and scale to over 1Ghz, way more than adequate for any future iPhone. And these Cotex cores are the CURRENTLY available generation.
I agree with what you are saying, and it's not as much of a stretch as some may think that they could apply their knowledge to chips in Apple's iPhone or other platforms. Apparently, members of their team have worked on Intel's Itanium and ADM's Opterons.
Actually.. As a founding member of the PowerPC alliance, Apple "owns" the instruction set (together with Freescale, IBM and Power.org). P. A. Semi only have a broad license from IBM.
I don't think Apple is buying PA for their IP portfolio and great engineers. I don't think they bought them for their products either. I think it's a mix of everything. PA is a great small company with great minds, great portfolio, great product, great promise and a bright future. They are just starting to make money and Apple might snatch them up while they are cheap. It's a sort of venture investment. They might use them as they use FileMaker Inc.. i.e. in a not so obvious way, and not in their core business. Sure they might use their processors in future Apple TVs or AirPort stations but I think PA will be a quite autonomous entity within Apple. Perhaps they will use some talent, patents and some product, but the main think is to use it as a pure investment, like they did with ARM once.. Sure, they used ARM chips in Newton but Apple earned a lot more money selling the stock at a later date.
One thing is certain.. PA is a really good company. If Apple wanted to use them for making custom made chips for any application using any architecture, PA is probably one of the best companies in the business. Certainly compared to their size.
gnasher729
Suspended
Audible.com makes audio books, people buy them, put them onto their iPods, and listen to them. That way Apple sells a few iPods more. If Apple bought the company, would they change anything to make this work better for Apple? No.
PA Semi makes high performance chips that are relatively low power. If Apple buys the company, would they change anything to make this work better for Apple? Yes.
mdriftmeyer
macrumors 68040
Apple needs and wants greater in-roads within the Federal/Military Markets.
You don't cut off your nose to spite your face so expect some interesting uses for these chips now and in the future.
You don't cut off your nose to spite your face so expect some interesting uses for these chips now and in the future.