Apple to build its own chips
p2pnet news view | Products:- Apple is going the whole hog. (Phrase used advisedly.)
It’s, “building a significant capability to design its own computer chips, a strategy shift that the company hopes will create exclusive features for its gadgets and shield Apple’s work from rivals,” says the Wall Street Journal.
The company is, “hiring people from many different segments of the semiconductor industry, including engineers to create multifunction chips that are used in cellphones to run software and carry out other chores”.
But it isn’t only about “sharply” reducing the “power consumption of its hit iPhone and iPod touch devices,” or possibly adding graphics circuitry, “to help its hardware play realistic game software and high-definition videos,” says the story.
Instead, it’s about secrecy and wanting to, “share fewer details about its technology plans with external chip suppliers,” says the story.
The “new effort faces plenty of hurdles, and people familiar with Apple’s plans don’t expect internally designed chips to emerge until next year at the earliest,” says the WSJ, adding:
“Still, Apple’s aggressive hiring is another sign of how the company’s recent success has allowed it to expand while other tech giants have trimmed their work forces in the recession. Apple’s strategy also marks a break from a long-term trend among most big electronics companies to outsource the development of chips and other components
“Apple’s own job postings, some aggregated by the site Indeed.com, provide clues about possible features to come. Two recent postings involve handwriting recognition technology; several others seek expertise in chips for managing displays.
“Apple participated in a job fair earlier this month for soon-to-be-unemployed engineers at memory chip company Spansion Inc., which sought bankruptcy protection in March …”
Wall Street Journal – In Major Shift, Apple Builds Its Own Team to Design Chips, April 30, 2009
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April 30th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
There are enough apple fanboys to make so-called “trusted computing” pervasive.
Apple is worse than Microsoft.
May 1st, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Apple should have built its own chips in the late 1970s when they broke away from Atari to make computers. Then they would not have tied themselves to existing manufacturers, and they could have had 16-bit Macs by 1982 (and possibly even 32-bit Macs by 1985!)
But there was an impetus to stay away from chips. When Jobs and Wozniak worked at Atari, one of their bigger projects was the arcade game Breakout, which in using too many of the kind of chips available at the time, was far too expensive. Their task was to design discrete hardware for Breakout so as not to use so many of the chips.
The end result was not very pretty: The resulting hardware design used virtually no chips and couldn’t be duplicated by other engineers, even though it worked! But someone else had to redesign it as a result.