Reports Say Apple May Manufacture Its Own Chips

afabbro writes "There are scattered reports today that Apple is building a team to design its own chips, with an eye towards reducing power consumption on iPods and iPhones."

design it's own chips, not manufacture

[Gary W. Longsine]

I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that Apple is planning to build their own fab.

Manufacture or design?

[Cutie Pi]

There's a big difference between manufacturing a chip and designing one. Unless Apple suddenly acquires the capital and know how to run a fab, manufacturing is best left to foundries like TSMC.

I'd even be surprised if they did the design completely in-house. Most likely it would be a collaborative effort with an already established low-power design house like ARM.

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[Gary W. Longsine]

Apple participated in the design of the PowerPC. That worked out pretty well. I've had two people tell me within the past week that they went back and used a PowerPC Mac Mini (both upgraded to 1GB of RAM) and how zippy it was under Leopard. They were surprised, since the systems were something like 5 years old, and max out at 1GB of RAM.

Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).

Apple is also a participant in LLVM, which is going to help Apple shorten the design-to-deployment cycle for new silicon.

It's going to work out just fine.

May? MAY???

[gordguide]

" ... Reports Say Apple May Manufacture Its Own Chips ..."

" ... "PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, according to The New York Times during Apple's June 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference. ..."

From the Horse's Mouth, 9 months ago, announced publicly at the WDC. I think I would be going with " ... will manufacture it's own chips ..." since that's what they said they would be doing, right out loud in front of God and everybody.

Re:Manufacture or design?

[EMB Numbers]

You mean "an already established low-power design house like" PAsemi http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/23/apple-buys-pasemi-tech-ebiz-cz_eb_0422apple.html [forbes.com]

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Before the Intel switch, Apple absolutely designed its own chipsets and boards. Apple was responsible, for example, for the first marrying of the PPC 970 and HyperTransport.

Apple has never owned a fab, but then, neither do many dedicated chip "manufacturers."

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[bhtooefr]

Apple also participated in the design of the initial ARM processors. That seems to be going pretty well. (Direct descendants of the design are in iPhone).

Nitpick: Acorn, not Apple, solely did the design of the initial ARM1, ARM2, and ARM3. They then spun the ARM CPU (which originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine) off into another company, Advanced RISC Machines, which was a joint venture between themselves (40%,) VLSI (who did most manufacturing of ARM CPUs and chipsets at that point - 40%,) and Apple (20%,) as Apple had expressed interest in using the chip, but didn't want to use a competitor's chip (Acorn directly competed with Apple in the personal computer market, especially in schools.)

Only the ARM6 (there was no ARM4 or ARM5) and newer had any Apple involvement, and I doubt anything newer than the DEC StrongARM had much of any Apple influence. (The ARM6, ARM7, and StrongARM were all used in the Newton.)

And, the ARM6 and ARM7 are essentially tweaked versions of the ARM3 with 32-bit addressing (as opposed to 26-bit on the previous ARMs,) and more cache and a slightly faster clock in the case of the ARM7. As for the StrongARM, it wasn't even designed by ARM, it was designed by Digital, to meet the ARMv4 ISA.

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[Burkin]

Microsoft doesn't have that experience, because they don't build systems.

So the Xbox, Xbox 360 and Zune are what now?

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[Grishnakh]

I don't know for sure, but just because they own a chip "manufacturer" doesn't mean they own a fab. I'd be willing to bet they don't. There's lots of semiconductor companies that don't have fabs at all; they're called "fabless". P.A. Semi was probably one of them. Here's some others you may have heard of: Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Marvell, MediaTek, ATI (before AMD acquired them), Xilinx. Here's an article [wikipedia.org] about them. These companies simply design chips; they get other companies called "foundries" to make their chips for them. The largest and oldest of these is TSMC, a Taiwanese company.

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[Darkness404]

And we all know how well the 360 ended up turning out. Lets see, drives that scratched disks, red rings of death, etc. Sure, they have fixed most of their problems now, but at the start of the 360 lifetime it was a total mess. On the other hand, the PS3 and Wii consoles had little to no issues (about the only one I can think of is that some Wii units could have a dirty optical lens because of smoke, dust, etc. that made it hard to read some dual-layer disks but that is mostly all fixed now)

Re:It didn't work for microsoft...

[ciroknight]

There's really not as much to it as you think. They're just layers of etched copper in a fiberglass substrate. Intel makes a lot of reference board designs with the complete layout of the traces and layers in the copper and fiberglass, and Dell is notorious for just taking those and putting their names on it. Formerly they didn't even bother to go that far, but now they actually do change the silkscreens (and sometimes the shape a bit to make them fit in their case, which really isn't hard for even a first grader to do as long as they're not moving RAM or CPU traces). Dell (and Asus, Gigabyte.. pretty much anyone building generic motherboards for the ubercheap computer range) does this because it's incredibly cheap; Intel's licensing allows Dell access to the reference designs basically for free, which means they don't have to pay for prototypes and don't have to pay engineers hundreds of thousands a year to lay them out.

Apple has, more or less since the beginning of their company, designed their own boards from scratch, taking the chips they want, then laying out the boards themselves and sending those designs off to be built. This alone doesn't mean much; anyone who's been through an electronics course in college has probably done a board or two. However, building modern boards actually is a really damned hard (thousands of pins, some traces need to have even length, enough substrate between them to eliminate crosstalk, power/noise concerns, etc). The fact that Apple cares to do this, and makes boards that are very high quality is a testament to their dedication to build the machine from the bare metal up.