- Friday, 27 November 2009
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You can crush a man with journalism - William Randolph Hearst
Fruitzilla resumes flirtation with PowerPC
THE BOYS IN WHITE from Cappuccino have revealed to the world that they have deigned to purchase a lesser company to integrate it into their plans for domination of the five per cent of the computer buying world that loves their products.
The company in question is the decidedly unsexy PA Semi, a chip design firm based in the Valley. Although no acquisition price was revealed (the rumours are in the region of $270-280 milyun), we suspect that at least $100,000 was added on to the cost to enable the firm's engineers to outfit themselves in Converse trainers and snarky t-shirts, as is de rigeur for a company as hip-it-hurts as Apple.
PA Semi has 150 engineers and was started by Dan Dobberphul, who previously designed Alpha and StrongARM chips for DEC in the late twentieth century.
Press speculation is rife that Apple intends to use the small, low-power chips to power next-generation Iphones and Ipods, end-arounding Intel and saving themselves some mega-bucks in the process.
It's true that PA Semi specialises in low-power chips - it's latest 64-bit desktop processor consumers just 5-13W at 2GHz, which is an impressive feat. But such an approach would seem slightly out of step with Apple's current roadmaps and strategy. It is widely believed that Intel's mobile technology will power the next iteration of the Iphone, and Apple has made no secret of its close engineering relationship with Intel which has seen it harness the power of Intel's massive design team to create nigh-on bespoke products.
To attempt to compete with Intel's expertise in house would distract from the firm's core mission of making its name based on interface and industrial design rather than raw microprocessing. His Jobsness is also well aware of the damage that was done to Apple's brand by the sub-par performance and design of its old PowerPC processors compared to the constantly-innovating x86 market.
Indeed, as newer portable devices run increasingly sophisticated versions of the desktop OSX, to converge the software platform and diverge the hardware platform seems a little strange.
Our guess is that Jobs has other plans for PA Semi, but who on earth knows what at this stage. ยต
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This fella's name is Dobberpull? You can't be serious!

Aren't you pulling my ... leg?
Right now, Leopard runs on PowerPC and x86 architectures (for desktop/server purposes) and ARM (for the iPhone) - so moving the iPhone to a PowerPC chip would reduce the number of architectures from 3 to 2. I suspect it'll be a long time before they can stop supporting PowerPC systems in OS X anyway.

The other possibility is including these chips as something other than the main CPU - many systems, particularly high-performance workstations and servers, have additional processors controlling things like networking and RAID storage - the current PA Semi offering seems ideally suited to this job, with fast iSCSI, SSL and TCP/IP features.
are ppl crazy or what? A chip that consumes 5-13W cannot possibly be used in an iphone or an ipod. So either Apple wants the engineers to design a completely new chip, which will take several years, or apple is designing a new product.
Has someone forgotton the whole concept of patent and technology sharing (for a price)? It's quite possible and even likely that his-jobs-ness forsaw this company being snapped up by one of it's partners. *cough* Intel. This is just the type of aquisition I would want to have in my wallet as a nice little bargaining chip. Anyone with an eye on tech knows this company holds some sweeeeet IP. When something like that becomes ripe pickin's either you do it or you watch someone else do it. Aaaaaand then hold it over YOUR head.
My money is on two possibilities:

1. The fact that if Intel wanted to buy semi, they would probably have to fight an expensive legal battle due to monopolies and all that kinda stuff. Better way to get hold of/license that IP is to get their best buddies to acquire it, then they can work together - a true partnership...

2. If AMD doesn't sort themselves out, they may end up turning into ATI with a small embedded processor department. Nvidia haven't stepped forward to challenge Intel in the CPU arena yet, and may not bother for a bit. All this means is that Intel will end up with a monopoly because no-one will be able to compete. Then, like IBM and MS before them, they'll milk everyone dry, including the fruiterers. If you are so reliant on someone else's product, its a good idea to support their competition.

Or, it could be just some corporate scam thing - another way of dragging money out of Apple into Jobs' own back pocket...who knows...not unheard of for them to cook the books...
"five per cent of the computer buying world that loves their products" so assuming this is based on sales i could assume the only people that love enzo ferrari's or bugatti veyrons are those that go out and buy them? maybe everyone just can't afford quality built machines...