With P.A. Semi under its belt, and now "people familiar with the deal" reporting to
The New York Times that a purchase of Intrinsity is a go, Apple's march to ARM preeminence is becoming much more clear. A rumor
about an Intrinsity purchase surfaced a few weeks ago when the processor design firm's website went down and a few of its employees switched their LinkedIn employee status over to Apple, but now we've got some solid confirmation -- though Apple and Intrinsity are still staying tight-lipped about the deal. Intrinsity's rumored contribution to the iPad's A4 chip is a modified A8 core it designed dubbed the Hummingbird, which squeezes 1GHz of performance out of a chip regularly limited to a mere 650MHz. It's unlikely that this acquisition will shed much more light on the internals of the iPad or future Apple devices -- in fact, it might help obfuscate them -- but it's clear that Apple is dead set on owning as much IP and "smart people" in relation to ARM as it can muster. Of course, the next big rumor on this front is a purchase of
ARM itself, but that's an entirely different
can of worms.
posted April 27th 2010 5:07PM
@Motlee I was wondering the same thing. Had a little snafu remembering my password and I got beaten to the punch. Is this true, though? If it's the same chip, it seems like Apple would have acquired it awhile ago to integrate it into the iPad, but Samsung was just showing it off. Did they get a license to it before Apple bought Intrinsity, and will we see that Hummingbird design in any other phones, I wonder?
Wasn't Hummingbird the name of the chip that Samsung was showing off a few weeks back? There was one that they didn't seem to make a big deal about, but then people noticed that if Samsung's numbers were correct, their chip would actually be much faster than the Snapdragon. I believe it was rumored to be designed by Intrinsity, too, and slated for their new Galaxy S Android handset that they recently announced. I wonder how similar that is to the A4.
@mamoore1982
Samsung's hummingbird was actually announced last year, and intrinsity did help them design it. The A4 is nothing but Apple's version of the same exact design, possibly tweaked a little, but probably not.
@DoctarPeppar
The same exact design? Possible tweaked, but maybe not?
Stop trying to be an expert, and just admit to yourself you don't really have a clue
so, Apple will ditch x86 and go all the way with ARM for their laptop, iMAC, etc. running iphone OS since there are lots of apps for them.
@alext
Can you imagine? OS XI/11/whatever designed exclusively for ARM procs. Imagine how long your battery would last on that!
@Gas
Apple had RISC cpus before in their desktops \ laptops -- they were PowerPCs...and they sucked.
@alext Um, yeah, actually, no. (Was that sarcastic?)
ARM make low-power chips, not desktop or even fast laptop chips. Put it another way, ARM Cortex A9 dual-core is probably faster than single-core Atom, but probably slower than dual-core Atom. And (like dual-core Atom) it's not even out in shipping netbooks yet. Quad-core won't be out for a while longer.
So with Cortex A9, ARM chips will be fast enough to run netbooks. Mac Pros? Not so much.
From a tactical purchase point of view, it makes sense for Apple to purchase ARM.
From a supplier perspective it's no different than Samsung providing Apple ram or LG providing Apple screens. I think as long as Apple was made to honour supply contracts it's a damned good example of vertical integration. Apple is getting to the point where a lot of it's suppliers are competitors in key markets so it makes sense for Apple to grab a piece of the component market.
It seems like Apple is currently amassing a team of people who can work magic with ARM, before then moving forward for surely what must be a larger acquisition.
Apple originally owned ARM in part and it seems like their futures are pretty intertwined.
I personally don't buy the regulatory issue here of it being anti-competitve. It's only on a par with AMD swallowing up ATI, all be it on a larger scale. I think people would fear it but thats not to say it's not perfectly legal. If Apple was to start playing like Intel, manufacturers would quickly move to another chip platform plus for Apple it would be a nice revenue spinner.
Trust me here in the UK no one is precious about ARM. We'd ship the Queen to Korea given enough cash incentive. But thats my 10 pence!
@BurtonBytes
The other ARM lisencers wouldn't be happy with Apple buying ARM. In fact they would be so unhappy they would start a bidding war, and that would be bad for everyone.
Second, there isn't much point for apple to buy ARM. The lisence costs of cpus apple uses are a pittance. If it got out to bidding war some other manufacturer who uses far more arm cpus would get much bigger savings by buying ARM. Samsung and Nokia comes to mind. Nokia uses about 400 million arm cpus in a year for phones, Samsung about 150 million. Either of them would get bigger savings by buying SRM than apple.
LOL. This just means Apple spent some money on the same company that made the Hummingbird in the Samsung Galaxy S. Knowing this it should be a fairly simple task once the iPad is rooted proper to fix it and throw Android on there and make it a product worth using.
On another more serious note. I hope people realize that by purchasing Intrinsity it does ABSOLUTELY nothing other than get them some talented ARM engineers. Seeing that ARM licenses are manufacturing licenses that everyone + dog that makes an ARM chip owns. I personally can't wait for the OMAP4440 from T.I. and the Tegra 2 to start making there way into consumer devices.
@Vanityeverlastingbonet
Shit like this should be an auto-ban.
What I don't get is that Samsung had this chip first last year (the hummingbird) and they didn't do shit with it in terms of their own products...in fact, most of their phones don't even use samsung made cpus...I guess their cpu \ mobile divisions are two separate entities and they are better off making chips for someone else than they are at making them for their own devices...
@DoctarPeppar
Yes, it's called Anti-trust legislation, which South Korea also has.
Samsung is effectively a holding group that is made of individual companies for different sectors. Samsung Semiconductor is different from Samsung Electronics. There's also Samsung Heavy Industry which makes large ships. Now if they could only stuff one of those into a cell phone....
@M3
But they are using the hummingbirds in the Galaxy S and Galaxy S Pro this year...I guess it was still in design phase last year, either that or they promised apple that they could have the spotlight?
@DoctarPeppar
Well, they did do the Galaxy S probably last year when they just presented it. And yes they are two separate entities, but they will probably use more in-house chips in the future so they don't have to be so dependent on 3d-party chip suppliers and they begin to have a nice IP portfolio so it would make sense at least in the high end segment, low to mid end segments volume parts makes more sense.
And maybe their own chips are used in other home electronic devices
Now that I think about it Google just bought Agnilux so this must be Apple's "me too" response. Nevermind I have my answer. Steve wanted to play big boy too.
@Darkseider
Hey genius Apple was buying chip companies before Google.
We've known about this since early-April.
"Intrinsity's rumored contribution to the iPad's A4 chip is the a modified A8 core it designed dubbed the Hummingbird, which squeezes 1GHz of performance out of a chip regularly limited to a mere 650MHz."
That's just ridiculous. The Hummingbird is not the only A8 which runs at 1GHz, and claiming that it's regularly limited to a mere 650MHz is just plain wrong. The OMAP36xx runs from 720MHz - 1GHz, stock, for example. It's not like it's some magic design that they're doing that lets them clock it at 1GHz.
@jhoff80 Shh... Apple needs to trump up its' superiority. This posted from my Droid running at 1.2 Ghz on a Cortex A-8 OMAP 3430. Go figure, eh?
@jhoff80 TI had to do some significant back-end work to get their Cortex to 1 GHz. This includes using a fairly high-leakage process which is usually avoided in the mobile space for obvious reasons.
The A8 in your typical low-power process was not projected to reach 1 GHz by ARM when it was released. There are, of course, many ways that you can tweak it to get it there. Using dynamic logic like Intrinsity did, for instance.
@Gas Yeah... how hard is it to modify the comment-posting script to auto-ban people who's only characters entered are "first" and variations thereof ("f1rst", "F1R57" ..etc)
Hell, give me 10 minutes with the source code of the comments system... I could do it myself.
An Apple buyout of ARM would be a tough one to get through in the UK, THANKFULLY! ...don't want to see that happen to me olde Acorn.
It's only a matter of time till the EU starts sueing apple for monopolistic behaviour. And I doubt Nokia will let Apple buy ARM.
I recall Apple owned a hefty chunk (the majority?) of ARM at one time, but had to sell it when they faced financial issues.
@ashleythehottiest
wow look at all the down ranks add me to the list
but in all seriousness i never knew that apple's A4 was basically an overclocked Cortex-A8 core.
What year do you guys predict devices such as smartphones and slates will be using dual-core processors.
@kevlar
Give a gaggle of trolls 10 seconds each with a keyboard and they will get around any auto ban system in no time.
why does apple needs to buy another company just to make an arm chip? don't they make their own chips for stuff already? or have people that can do them?
Gotta loves how Microsoft got all the shit for Windows being a "monopoly" when everything Apple does these days seems to be furthering their goal for a complete control on software, hardware, and ideas.
What Apple really needs to do:
Buy Adobe.
Fix it.
@BuzzMega Flash is bad enough on windows already, i can only imagine how much worse apple would make it. Just about all the software apple writes for the Win platform is utter bloated garbage.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f3fe74c817/steve-job-s-reaction-iphone-leak
Wow. All of that iPhone 4g hype went all the way the ABC World News. Basically it was about Jason, the guy who demonstrated the iphone 4g to the world on YouTube, and whether he is innocent or whatever for buying the phone. I was surprised to see the story on the news. Go to the abcnews website for the full story!
http://abcnews.go.com/m/screen?id=10488703&pid=79
Here's the link to the abcnews site from my comment earlier. The iPhone 4g was on the news on 4/27.
If Apple wanted to own ARM, they would own ARM. Apple helped set arm up in the first place. They approached Sir Robin Saxby when he was working for some European mobile phone company (I forget which one) with a boat load of cash and said here set up a company that does this, so he did.
I would be surprised if Apple didn't already own a large chunk of ARM.
Well that's what Sir Robin told me a couple of years ago anyway.
"The ARM Cortex™-A8 processor is based on the ARMv7 architecture and has the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz. The Cortex-A8 processor can meet the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices needing operation in less than 300mW; and performance-optimized consumer applications requiring 2000 Dhrystone MIPS." Great Job Intrinsity!!! However did you squeeze 1 ghz outta that?