Apple iPad biggest news is Apple A4 chip. Now they fully control supply chain
i.gizmodo.com
i.gizmodo.com
However, I wonder how the business scale of building their own processors is going to work for the. Will the A4 move into the iPhone products? If the iPad isn't a huge success, that processor is going to cost them more than having bought from a chip supplier.
What tech does the new processor really bring?
Chips are plenty powerful enough to run apps (for the standard consumer). Now the race is to be the most efficient chip, and since that's a fairly new race Apple should have a good chance at it.
You have to earn a return on all the additional assets you have by going vertical. The Street will punish you if you just buy companies to make more "profit" but your return on assets decline.
Real reason is probably tweaking designs to their needs in a way that competitors can't access.
"Testing conducted by Apple in January 2010 using preproduction iPad units and software. Testing consisted of full battery discharge while performing each of the following tasks: video playback, audio playback, and Internet browsing using Wi-Fi. Video content was a repeated 2-hour 23-minute movie purchased from the iTunes Store. Audio content was a playlist of 358 unique songs, consisting of a combination of songs imported from CDs using iTunes (128-Kbps AAC encoding) and songs purchased from the iTunes Store (256-Kbps AAC encoding). Internet over Wi-Fi tests were conducted using a closed network and dedicated web and mail servers, browsing snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages, and receiving mail once an hour. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Battery life depends on device settings, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPad units; actual results may vary."
Why they choose their own product instead anyother? May be its better, at just 1Ghz 10" interface is super fluid. 10 hours of video on single charge. And owning supply chain doesn't only mean more profit. Now they control features and tweak chips to their own needs much more easily.
And the arm platform is quite an open platform. I bet any successful company can work with big semi companies to tweak chips.
The biggest advantage is secrecy.If apple has some unique feature - it gives them the time to secretly do research on processor architectures for it.
But not a lot of value for features everybody are looking for. in this case open r&d is better.
That's how ARM started. The designers of the Archimedes computer looked round for a powerful but cheap CPU and couldn't find one, so they decided to build their own. They had a very small team, so by necessity it was a simple design - but that ended up being its strength.
There's still reasons, though, such as piecing together a systsem on a chip to meet specific power and feature requirements.
Which I'm not sure is the case either...
From http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10442684-64.html :
By definition, the A4 is a system-on-a-chip, or SOC, that
integrates the main processor, graphics silicon, and other
functions like the memory controller on one piece of silicon...* Apple predicts that sales will be high enough to justify building an iPad-specific processor. I assume nobody outside of Apple will get to use the A4 or derivative chips.
* Apple feels that there was no external vendor that could cost-effectively get the exact power-performance trade-off they wanted for the suite of applications that they want to optimize.
* Tempering the previous point, this may be a net loss in the case of the iPad alone in terms of pure costs versus going with an external vendor, BUT they now have much better negotiating power for all their other processor purchases from Intel, Samsung, ARM, etc. They can always threaten to roll their own. So even if they lose some money on the A4, they may be in a better position overall
* EDIT: Let me also add that despite what some people are claiming this is likely NOT an ARM, but based on PA Semi's power-efficient flavor of the Power architecture. I believe the Power architecture is in the same family as the Motorola PowerPCs that Apple formerly used and dumped for Intel because of the PowerPC's lower power-efficiency.
Machine-code translation can be done well, but that still doesn't mean trying to pack a desktop OS onto a mobile platform is going to be a good idea.
(Commodore really took off when they acquired MOS Technology. It enabled them to develop the custom silicon they needed to make the VIC, 64, and Amiga world-class game-changing machines.)
Now they own an ARM licensee.
The VIC-II was apparently built so quickly without simulation tools because they fabbed custom test runs of individual parts of the chip with debug logic added. This "unit-test" style development had chip spins coming out in 2 weeks.
Nowadays, you do this with simulation or an FPGA.
Snapdragons extend by adding in the wireless circuitry. I'd wager that A4 left that to other chips and extended with someone's graphic rendering engine, say Imagination Technologies?
But I think the most important reason is that it lets Apple make the design decisions that make sense for their projected use, not what some chip house thinks will be the focus three years down the road.
It's the same as Intel and AMD both making x86 chips; the ISA is the same but the design is different. However, ARM is more than happy to let Qualcomm design thier own.
Check http://www.arm.com/miscPDFs/14128.pdf
for more details than are simple to read.
On the other hand, adding these in the laptops might be interesting... But I don't think they are in a hurry to switch architectures so soon.
I find it odd that Apple bought PA Semi who were apparently working on a variant of the Power architecture and had them stop what they were doing and switch to implementing an ARM.
If the architecture is ARM, it would mean that Apple bought PA Semi for the purpose of getting them to dump their main architecture, which was the whole reason they were created, and got them to switch over to ARM and develop, fabricate, and test the chip in the span of a about a year.
I'll place my bets on Power architecture + ARM emulation/JIT/whatever or iPhone App recompile for the iPad.