[Info-vax] OT: About proprietary chips

[John Wallace]

On Jan 27, 9:29 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Interesting development today. Apple unveiled its new Ipad (no, it isn't
> a feminine hygiene product :-).
>
> Yeah, there has been a lot of hype and speculation about it (Apple knows
> what buttons to push to automatically create such free advertising).
>
> What is interesting is that Apple, not so long ago, purchased a small
> semiconductor firm. And this new product incorporates an Apple designed
> chip as it main CPU.
>
> So, on the one hand, Apple went to industry standard for its computers
> (the 8086). But for its handheld products, it is now moving to a
> proprietary chip. Probably because it feels it has high enough volume to
> cost justify it and might give it an edge over the other "iphone
> wannabes" who will be using off the shelf chips.
>
> Not sure if this chip uses the ARM instruction set or not.
>
> Alpha failed because it didn't reach sufficient numbers. IA64 certaintly
> hasn't become commodity and/or high volume. Will be interesting to see
> if Apple will be able to get large enough numbers to make its A4 chip
> viable.

Yes it seems to be an ARM-based chip.

With ARM-based chips, typically the chip designer (in this case, PA
Semiconductor, who Apple bought recently) pays ARM for the instruction
set licence and then builds their own application-specific "system on
a chip" (SoC).

I'm not sure I understand your "proprietary" vs "industry standard"
distinction here.

You'd have to have very special reasons in this kind of commodity
market to pick something that wasn't industry standard, and the ARM
architecture is industry standard in low power consumer electronics.

"might give it an edge over the other "iphone wannabes" who will be
using off the shelf chips."

They're already all using ARM architecture chips. It's what's inside
and around the SoC, and the software that runs on it, that
distinguishes the various ARM-based product offerings.

With the pricing that the Apple fanclub are usually willing to
support, Apple should have no problem making A4 financially viable,
though from the little I've read so far, I'm not sure who the non-
fanboy market are. As far as development costs are concerned, the hard
work inside the processor has already been done and those costs are
shared across ARM's customer base; Apple need only pay the costs of
developing their own specific customisations, addons, and tools. There
are already plenty of ARM development tools (hardware and software) so
there's not necessarily a huge cost there either. The fabrication of
the chip is again something whose costs are potentially shared with
other ARM customers.

I don't want to belittle the task, but building an ARM-based SoC (and
hence an ARM-based system) is a far cry from designing a new and
exclusive chip from the ground up. If it wasn't, ARM wouldn't be so
succesful at what they do.