
Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era - aab1d
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/09/apple-1000-engineers-chips/
======
raganwald
What I find interesting about Apple designing their own chips is the notion
that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Apple's value proposition
with Macintosh is that by owning the entire experience--hardware, OS, even
distribution to the store--Apple can deliver an optimized product that is
superior to products where company H makes the hardware, M makes the OS, and
CC distributes the resulting PCs.

Designing chips is the logical extension to this model. The chips are designed
with the end product in mind, and everything works together to deliver the
product's value proposition.

Other manufacturers end up hostage to whatever chips Intel and AMD feel like
selling to everyone. They are hostage to whatever OS features Google feels
like adding to Android, whether I integrates with the chips or not.

It's not a given that Apple will _necessarily_ succeed with this strategy, it
requires an ability to juggle multiple balls at once, a very rare trait.
There's a reason most businesses try to do just one thing well and commoditize
everything else.

But it is certainly beautiful to watch them try to sail the opposite tack.

~~~
mahyarm
Many car manufacturers build and design the entire car themselves, internal
and external parts included and sell them at one car brand dealerships and
service them at dealerships. They might contract things like tires, audio
speakers and stereo systems out, and occasional a part here and there, but by
default they build everything else themselves.

~~~
tptacek
_Most_ car manufacturers do not. For instance, how many of them do their own
ECUs? And large swaths of the American car industry have long been defined by
outsourcing relationships. Remember Delphi?

~~~
detst
True. Being around Detroit you can see the entire industry that supports the
"Big Three". There are companies that either supply or assist in the build of
nearly every component of a car.

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gardarh
Sometimes I think the hype around Apple's A4/A5 chips is a bit much. Does
anyone know if these chips are significantly different from e.g. Samsung's
Exynos chips or for that matter any other chip on this list:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore> ?

~~~
wmf
I don't know why this was voted down. The A4 is very similar to the
contemporary Samsung SoC and I wouldn't be surprised if the A5 is very similar
to Exynos. So far, Apple doesn't appear to be getting any dramatic advantages
from having their own chips, especially considering the risk of not being able
to switch chip vendors.

~~~
dos1
I think the one big advantage of having their own chips is the marketing
angle. It's much cooler to say an Apple iPhone comes with an Apple A5 chip
than with a Samsung Exynos chip.

~~~
gardarh
Let me rephrase: What is the main difference (feature wise) between the Exynos
4210 and A5? What technical backing does their marketing have (9x better this
and 100% faster that).

Samsung is pretty explicit about what their SoC contains:
[http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/product...](http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos%204210)
\- well they have to, opposed to Apple they're selling the chip seperately.

~~~
rsynnott
The Exynos uses an ARM Mali 400 GPU; the A5 uses an Imagination Tech
SGX543MP2. The latter is far faster; at least twice as fast in most
benchmarks. Also, the A5 is known to have a lot of extra DSP hardware on chip,
but the purpose of that is somewhat unclear for now (it has been claimed that
it's to do with facial recognition, fast camera operation and/or Siri, but
really no-one knows for now).

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xxcode
the text of the article doesn't seem to explain how the assertion is made.
Until last year (when I left apple), the PA Semi team (which is the A4/A5
team) was about 20 people (and they were hiring 3-4 more), so this is somewhat
difficult to believe, but I might have outdated information. The designs are
mostly modified arm designs.

~~~
alain94040
1,000 is probably wrong, counting every possible person who is vaguely related
to hardware.

But the PA Semi team is way larger than 20 engineers, that's for sure. Even
before the acquisition by Apple, they had way more engineers than 20. I'm the
guy who filmed their product launch at the Power Conference.

~~~
petermonsson
Wikipedia says 150 people for PA Semi before they got acquired.

1,000 has to be wrong for two reasons. 1) That's an explosion in staff which
your organization can't handle 2) 1,000 people on one chip is ridiculous and
only something Intel gets away with.

A good estimate for a SoC would top out at around 200 people for the design,
implementation and a 100% NIH syndrome.

~~~
wmf
It's chips, not one chip. I would guess that A7, A8, and A9 are being designed
in parallel.

~~~
jfb
Of course they are. How long does it take to get from design to production?
Apple takes the long view here.

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skimbrel
If this is true, I have to start wondering whether Apple plans to port OS X to
ARM. Granted, they’d probably have to evolve ARM into a 64-bit architecture,
but the power savings would be incredible. A MacBook Air with the battery life
of an iPad 2.

(We already know Apple is more than capable of executing CPU transitions on
the Mac. I suppose the only other question is how much people value Parallels
and Boot Camp.)

~~~
phillmv
They already did all the ground work when they forked OSX into iOS, and
they're notoriously paranoid about keep their options open. I bet you they
already have those prototypes lying around – but the economics won't make
sense for another five years.

~~~
wavephorm
No way it'll take 5 years to move to ARM. I bet we'll see ARM Macbook Airs by
the end of next year.

Here's what I think will happen - the Macbook Pro line will be slimmed down to
Air specs, the Air that exists today gets discontinued to make way for an all-
ARM version.

The Air brand will be the ARM laptop line, the Macbook Pro's will be x86 for a
few years before they too switch.

~~~
danssig
>the Macbook Pro line will be slimmed down to Air specs

Wow, I hope not. Right now I use MBP as a desktop replacement. I've been able
to get away with that so far because the iMac isn't normally dramatically far
ahead of the 17".

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maxklein
How can you even have 1000 people designing a chip? A micro-processor is not
_THAT_ complicated. Perhaps you can have people doing research on particular
aspects, but research teams are typically small (maybe 5-15 people). It seems
to me difficult to believe that it's even possible to have that number of
people designing a single and insular hardware product, of which the
manufacturing is being outsourced (so they don't have to build the making-
machines).

~~~
stonemetal
They probably don't all work on the same chip even if the final results are
worked down into a SOC. They probably have teams working on the graphics side
as well as the audio processor.

~~~
glassx
That's what I thought. Also, memory chips, LCD display and power controllers,
Thunderbolt... those can make a lot of difference in an Apple product.

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illumen
Fluff piece.

~~~
alexhaefner
Agreed. This article is ridiculous. But hey, people love to read stories about
Apple, no matter how fabricated and unrealistic they may be. Every article
posted from TechCrunch should get a warning label placed on it.

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ams6110
I would never count Apple out based on their track record over the last
decade, but I think it remains to be proven that they can execute on new
devices without Jobs.

None of their big successes, from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, were
anything brand new. They were better execution on an existing concept. We had
portable music players, we had mobile phones, we had tablet computers... Jobs
and Apple just out-executed everyone else in the market at identifying and
delivering a better implementation.

Here they are apparently talking about really new stuff. Stuff we've never had
before. Stuff that's "mind blowing." Last time I remember something like that
from Apple it was called Newton.

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rohern
I'm curious if anyone knows of any developers who now regularly use something
like an iPhone/iPad (more likely the latter) to program. I know Paul Graham
has written about this stage in the evolution of mobile devices, but is anyone
doing it yet? For myself I've played with a Lisp interpreter written for the
iPod Touch, but of course it was something of a ridiculous activity. If we can
start doing that then I'll feel a bit more "post-PC".

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andrewtbham
Is the subtext of the article wearable computers?

~~~
ugh
What do you mean?

Smartphones are obviously wearable computers and they already exist.

~~~
andrewtbham
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer>

~~~
ugh
Huh? Seems pretty clear from that that smartphones are obviously wearable
computers.

~~~
hugh3
They're the only type of "wearable" computers that make sense: i.e. computers
you can easily carry in your pocket.

Occasional fantasies of computers built into actual _clothes_ are the domain
of people who don't understand clothes very well.

~~~
ugh
Exactly. There is nothing that would stop us from making smartphones water
resistant and shock resistant and sowing them into clothes. It’s not that we
don’t do it because it’s impossible, we don’t do it because it’s a stupid
idea.

~~~
0x12
Ah, but think of the sponsor & advertising angle. Rent out the space on your
t-shirt.

Eventually every surface will turn in to an ad. And animated ads after that.
The animated t-shirt can't be all that far into our future.

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meric
It's coming! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693>

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Andys
Will Intel finally have some real competition?

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clistctrl
With steve gone, I wonder if there's a future of Apple selling any excess
chips for lower quality market competitors.

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mcantelon
Will they sell their chips to other vendors or will Apple treat the chips like
their OS and not allow access beyond their sphere of control? Will they put in
hardware-level controls to prevent jailbreaking?

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jeffreymcmanus
"the post PC era" is what the rest of us mortals have been calling "mobile"
for about 10 years. but more power to ya, guys!

~~~
erikpukinskis
The devices people referred to as "mobile" for all those years weren't ever
really intended as PC replacements... except perhaps in the developing world,
where there weren't many PCs to replace.

"The post PC era" is meant to refer to a world where (except in some specific
professional contexts) people largely stop buying PCs because of a new class
of mobile devices that takes over their workload entirely.

If I say "the mobile era" to people, that means something very different than
"the post PC era". This is what language is for. We create new words so we can
talk about new things, even when they're small changes.

Larry Ellison whines about the word "cloud" and insists it's just "servers".
But "cloud" is about instantaneous provisioning and other infrastructure that
lets you target an undifferentiated set of servers, rather than having to
administer each server one by one. And unlike a "cluster" you don't generally
own the whole thing. What word should we use, if not "cloud"?

Yes, it's still servers. Yes, the iPad is a mobile device. Yes servers and
mobile devices are old. But whats your problem with using new words for the
parts of these phenomena which are new?

~~~
jseliger
_"The post PC era" is meant to refer to a world where (except in some specific
professional contexts) people largely stop buying PCs because of a new class
of mobile devices that takes over their workload entirely._

Then I think we're a long way from seeing this era, simply because anything
that requires more than a couple lines of text isn't just better on a keyboard
than other input devices—it's vastly, insanely better (at the moment), a
problem I don't see being solved in the nearish future. Rather, I suspect many
if not most people will have one PC-esque device for keyboard heavy things and
one or more "mobile" devices, using your definition.

This also assumes you're not counting laptops under your "mobile" rubric,
which I don't think you are.

Anyway. I don't even see desktops going away all that soon because of one
thing that gets lost on HN discussion: they're cheap:
[http://jseliger.com/2008/12/26/computer-post-desktop-or-
lapt...](http://jseliger.com/2008/12/26/computer-post-desktop-or-
laptopnotebook/) .

~~~
glassx
"Then I think we're a long way from seeing this era"

Agreed, but we're just starting, maybe in a few years, who knows...

IMO, the term post-PC is a nice way to differentiate Android/iOS/WebOS/etc
tablets from previous generation tablets that ran Windows or some Desktop
version of Linux.

~~~
hugh3
I think the laptop, rather than tablet, form factor is going to dominate in
the medium-term future, because the portability vs usability tradeoff just
doesn't encourage giving up your keyboard.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the laptops of the future will have a full-
featured OS rather than a locked-down iOS-style OS. I mean, I'm sure yours
will, and mine will, but will your mother's?

~~~
glassx
Oh, agreed. And the newer ultrabooks make the portability vs usability
tradeoff much much smaller.

And maybe open/closed OSs will eventually converge. Look at Lion and Windows
8... I just hope they remain open!!!

