I'm a bit confused as to how taking reference designs from ARM and the SGX graphics component, and putting them together and sending them off to be made by someone else is a 1 billion dollar investment.
I highly doubt they just took the reference designs and shipped them off to be made as you put it.
Not to mention that the purchase of PA Semi was over quarter of a billion dollars alone, plus the ARM architectural license and PowerVR licensing fees. But they do no less with the chips than any of the competing chip makers do.
And I really don't understand why everyone is predicting that the chip will be a single core when the A-9MP design it is based on can have up to 4 cores, and the PowerVR chip can have up to 16 cores.
There would be a lot more to it than just saying give me 2 of those cores and 2 of those cores and paint an apple on the top of it.
I guess that's why you weren't asked to build the iPad. Hrmm? You're the one millions lining up to pay for it, no one expects you understand how its made.
@Nitesh It isn't a billion dollar investment. Ignoring what they paid for PA Semi, you can produce an chip using an ARM core using maybe 8 ASIC engineers for under a year. Total salary under $1M. Design the chip layout, RAM cores, test logic, busses, reset logic, any custom stuff you want to put in there... Sure you've got to pay NRE (that might be a million dollars right there) to the fab supplier. And you've got to pay the license fees to ARM. And and. So sure maybe its $10M or something when you're done. But it isn't a B-I-L-L-I-O-N dollars. The NYTimes pulled that one out of their ass.
@jaffreywali Apple isn't building their own foundries here, smaller companies have taken ARM reference designs as well as mobile GPU reference designs, stuck them on a SoC, and sent along the specifications to another company with a fabrication plant to make it. 1 billion seems extravagant for something like this, thats all I'm saying.
@Fanfoot Thats more along the lines of what I was thinking. Like I said, they aren't building their own foundries, 1 billion seems highly extravagant. Much smaller companies have taken ARM reference designs as well as mobile GPU reference designs, stuck them on a SoC, and sent along the specifications to another company with a fabrication plant to make it for much less than a billion dollars.
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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I'm a bit confused as to how taking reference designs from ARM and the SGX graphics component, and putting them together and sending them off to be made by someone else is a 1 billion dollar investment.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/22/custom_apple_a4_ipad_chip_estimated_to_be_1_billion_investment.html
@Nitesh
I highly doubt they just took the reference designs and shipped them off to be made as you put it.
Not to mention that the purchase of PA Semi was over quarter of a billion dollars alone, plus the ARM architectural license and PowerVR licensing fees. But they do no less with the chips than any of the competing chip makers do.
And I really don't understand why everyone is predicting that the chip will be a single core when the A-9MP design it is based on can have up to 4 cores, and the PowerVR chip can have up to 16 cores.
There would be a lot more to it than just saying give me 2 of those cores and 2 of those cores and paint an apple on the top of it.
@dennisheadley The Cortex A9 spec can only be a dual core or a quad core, who said its single?
@Nitesh Commenters insisting the A4 (without even knowing its full spec) is inferior to Tegra 2...
@Nitesh
I guess that's why you weren't asked to build the iPad. Hrmm?
You're the one millions lining up to pay for it, no one expects you understand how its made.
@Wesscoast How dare you!
I would never buy it, silly.
@Nitesh
that's why you're not someone who'll run a successful tech company. Simple as that. You don't and can't get it! LOL.
@Nitesh It isn't a billion dollar investment. Ignoring what they paid for PA Semi, you can produce an chip using an ARM core using maybe 8 ASIC engineers for under a year. Total salary under $1M. Design the chip layout, RAM cores, test logic, busses, reset logic, any custom stuff you want to put in there... Sure you've got to pay NRE (that might be a million dollars right there) to the fab supplier. And you've got to pay the license fees to ARM. And and. So sure maybe its $10M or something when you're done. But it isn't a B-I-L-L-I-O-N dollars. The NYTimes pulled that one out of their ass.
@jaffreywali Apple isn't building their own foundries here, smaller companies have taken ARM reference designs as well as mobile GPU reference designs, stuck them on a SoC, and sent along the specifications to another company with a fabrication plant to make it. 1 billion seems extravagant for something like this, thats all I'm saying.
@Fanfoot Thats more along the lines of what I was thinking. Like I said, they aren't building their own foundries, 1 billion seems highly extravagant. Much smaller companies have taken ARM reference designs as well as mobile GPU reference designs, stuck them on a SoC, and sent along the specifications to another company with a fabrication plant to make it for much less than a billion dollars.