Should Apple buy Nvidia?

[henchman]

Why woud Aple do that?
They got out of the component design and manufacturing game yeas ago.

Apple doesn'tbuild anything.
They design gadgets from pre-existing components.

 

[fertilized-egg]

Apple doesn'tbuild anything.
They design gadgets from pre-existing components.

Not true. The A5 chip is Apple's design. Plus even nVidia doesn't "build" its chips. It sends its design to a fab who manufactures it for nVidia.

... They have a really big following amongst PC enthusiasts so I think there was just an assumption that they would easily beat the other mobile contenders just because they were nvidia. ...

That name recognition certainly a big part of it but the Tegra series had so much hype and exposure for whatever reason and I'd suspect aggressive marketing is also plays a part. For instance OMAP4 is just as capable as Tegra2, if not more so, yet you never hear anybody discuss OMAP. Perhaps having a cool name is a big part too. I'd guess that first mover advantage of being the first to the dual core game helped its exposure a lot too.

 

[psonice]

Apple license the CPU cores from ARM, and the GPU cores from Imagination Tech. They stick those parts into a package with a bunch of other (probably all licensed and designed by other companies) parts and send it to Samsung, who make it.

So yes, they do buy off the shelf parts, and get somebody else to make it. They do create the package as a whole though, if the parts are bought in, and they do tweak the CPU quite a bit as far as I know.

Nvidia do the same (which is why tegra and A5 have the same CPU!). They also tweak the design, which is why performance is slightly different between them (the tegra actually dropped a whole section of the CPU called NEON that's quite important for some apps). They do design their own GPU though.