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Apple iPad biggest news is Apple A4 chip. Now they fully control supply chain
- liuliu 17y agoThe price is tempting. But I don't like the mindset of bigger ipod touch (app store and the closed OS).
- tfh 17y agoThe first thing that comes in mind is, if it's capable of running OS X. (or any other regular OS)
- stonemetal 17y agofrom other news reports it appears the A4 is just an Arm processor.
- necubi 17y agoNo, because the chip is ARM and therefore can only run operating systems that have been ported to ARM (this does, however, include various linux distributions).
- ecq 17y agoi'd love to see a vmware/parallels app for the iPad. imagine being able to run os x/windows/linux on this thing.
- rabidsnail 17y agoIt'd have to do machine-code translation, and so would be slow as hell. Try running windows in qemu some time to see what I mean.
- jsolson 17y agoTo be fair, qemu is appallingly slow. Windows in Microsoft's Virtual PC for Mac (on Power PC macs) was several orders of magnitude moe performant. Machine-code translation can be done well, but that still doesn't mean trying to pack a desktop OS onto a mobile platform is going to be a good idea.
- osipov 17y agoTrue. Now we can start a countdown until they move their proprietary chip into the iPhone.
- fierarul 17y agoIt's not that important actually. iPhone is a locked system hardware and software-wise. Whatever chip it's using now or in the future hardly matters. On the other hand, adding these in the laptops might be interesting... But I don't think they are in a hurry to switch architectures so soon.
- sketerpot 17y agoThe iPhone 3GS already uses a custom chip. It combines an ARM processor, a SIMD FPU, a GPU, and 128 MB of DRAM onto a single die. It's pretty neat.
- joshu 17y agoFully control the supply chain? Please don't editorialize like that.
- jmount 17y agoI know there are HN posting standards, but not all editorialization is bad. I find some opinions interesting and it gives you an angle to confirm or falsify when reading the article.
- FreeRadical 17y agoBut the opinion can be given in a comment.
- timdorr 17y agoDo they even own a plant or is production outsourced?
- pedalpete 17y agoAs far as I know, they aren't making screens, batteries, memory, and lots of other components, so they are yet to fully control the supply chain, but they are one step closer. However, I wonder how the business scale of building their own processors is going to work for the. Will the A4 move into the iPhone products? If the iPad isn't a huge success, that processor is going to cost them more than having bought from a chip supplier. What tech does the new processor really bring?
- cmos 17y agoIf they have the volume, which they probably will, more profit. This will allow them to do more R+D and eventually not give a portion of their profits to Intel for the big chips. Chips are plenty powerful enough to run apps (for the standard consumer). Now the race is to be the most efficient chip, and since that's a fairly new race Apple should have a good chance at it.
- timthorn 17y agoEfficiency isn't a new race. What's happening is that the desktop market segment is learning efficiency to meet the demands of the developing performance mobile segment, as traditional mobile is learning performance to also take that segment. That's a race that has been developing in the semico designers for around eight years, give or take, but product has only been available on the store shelf for a year or so.
- mediaman 17y agoMore accounting profit, not economic profit. You have to earn a return on all the additional assets you have by going vertical. The Street will punish you if you just buy companies to make more "profit" but your return on assets decline. Real reason is probably tweaking designs to their needs in a way that competitors can't access.
- infolito 17y ago10 hours of battery life in a device half an inch thick.
- n8agrin 17y agoI agree that the A4 chip is interesting. But to me the biggest news is that Apple is supplying the iPad with 3g access and an unlocked SIM. Not that the majority of people will buy an iPad, but they are preempting what I think we'll see in the future with data connectivity, namely that we'll pay a monthly subscription for wireless connectivity the same way many people now pay for cell phones instead of landlines. We'll expect a carrier of choice and we'll expect the service to be available almost everywhere and on almost every device.
- kschrader 17y agoIt's unlocked, but the radio only supports the ATT 3G frequencies in the US, so it's effectively locked in to ATT unless you want to use EDGE for everything on T-Mobile.
- pyre 17y agoKeep in mind that T-Mobile's 3G frequencies are the 'standard' ones internationally. Though, IIRC Telus (Canada) and maybe Rogers (also Canada) share the same non-standard 3G frequency as AT&T.
- mixmax 17y agoIt's just the US that's behind the curve on this. I have a 2Mbit 3g connection that works anywhere for $30 a month. Which is really great since I live on a boat, so I'm connected wherever my home happens to be.
- bitwize 17y agoThis makes Apple the new Commodore. (Commodore really took off when they acquired MOS Technology. It enabled them to develop the custom silicon they needed to make the VIC, 64, and Amiga world-class game-changing machines.)
- timthorn 17y agoThis isn't really new for Apple. They used to own a sizeable chunk of ARM (26% if memory serves) back in the days of Newton but ended up selling out. Now they own an ARM licensee.
- scythe 17y agoThey also used to be a major player in the PowerPC line.
- NateLawson 17y agoWhile I love Commodore, the analogy breaks down. MOS had their own fab, which allowed them to do lightning-fast turnaround. If Apple bought a fab today, you should short their stock because that is a low-margin, cash-hungry business. The VIC-II was apparently built so quickly without simulation tools because they fabbed custom test runs of individual parts of the chip with debug logic added. This "unit-test" style development had chip spins coming out in 2 weeks. Nowadays, you do this with simulation or an FPGA.
- ssp 17y agoSo, what does this chip do that, say, a Snapdragon doesn't?
- wmf 17y agoGenerate a reality distortion field.
- sschueller 17y agoCustom chip makes it hard to hack with no documentation and possible encryption built in.
- jacquesm 17y agoYou may be on to something there.
- jws 17y agoIt is almost certainly based on the Cortex A9 instead of the A8 that current Snapdragons use, which means multiple cores. Apple knows how to use multiple cores effectively and the ability to stop them when not using them is a nice power savings. Snapdragons extend by adding in the wireless circuitry. I'd wager that A4 left that to other chips and extended with someone's graphic rendering engine, say Imagination Technologies? But I think the most important reason is that it lets Apple make the design decisions that make sense for their projected use, not what some chip house thinks will be the focus three years down the road.
- timthorn 17y agoThe Snapdragon and Cortex A8 are both implementations of the ARM V7A architecture, but are completely separate designs. The Snapdragon is Qualcomm's version and is unique to Qualcomm, whereas the Cortex A8 is licensed by ARM to third parties. It's the same as Intel and AMD both making x86 chips; the ISA is the same but the design is different. However, ARM is more than happy to let Qualcomm design thier own.
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- jey 17y agoWhat's the A4? Probably some ARM variant design, right?
- wmf 17y agoIt's ARM. Given the "snappiness" one might speculate Cortex A9.
- maximilian 17y agoThis is what I also imagined. Anand over at anandtech posted a big review of the A9 and it seems like a big step forward for ARM chips. I'm sure someone will soak the A4 in a acid bath and take some photos of the raw silicon and tell us all. (in a few months)
- soundsop 17y agoWhere is the information coming from that it's ARM? I didn't see that information on any of the live-blogging sites. Did someone mention it in the Apple presentation? I find it odd that Apple bought PA Semi who were apparently working on a variant of the Power architecture and had them stop what they were doing and switch to implementing an ARM.
- wmf 17y agoOccam's razor. ARM provides backwards compatibility with iPhone apps.
- soundsop 17y agoOccam's razor doesn't apply the same to the hardware equation. If the architecture is ARM, it would mean that Apple bought PA Semi for the purpose of getting them to dump their main architecture, which was the whole reason they were created, and got them to switch over to ARM and develop, fabricate, and test the chip in the span of a about a year. I'll place my bets on Power architecture + ARM emulation/JIT/whatever or iPhone App recompile for the iPad.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- adolph 17y agoI wonder what the 4 stands for? Was there an A1, A2, A3?
- matasar 17y agoI assume it's a pun on paper size.
- cakesy 17y agoDamn, I hope the chip isn't that big.
- alex_c 17y agoThat's what I thought... but it doesn't seem very likely from a US company?
- pyre 17y agoApple has a history in design, where knowing about the A4 format is not uncommon. Besides, it's not like they could have named the processor Legal, Tabloid or Letter.
- quux 17y agoMaybe they wanted it to sound more mature than it really is :)
- soundsop 17y agoAs a circuit designer, I find it really surprising that Apple has rolled their own processor for the iPad. We finally confirm why Apple bought PA Semi. But it also says a lot about Apple and the processor industry: * Apple predicts that sales will be high enough to justify building an iPad-specific processor. I assume nobody outside of Apple will get to use the A4 or derivative chips. * Apple feels that there was no external vendor that could cost-effectively get the exact power-performance trade-off they wanted for the suite of applications that they want to optimize. * Tempering the previous point, this may be a net loss in the case of the iPad alone in terms of pure costs versus going with an external vendor, BUT they now have much better negotiating power for all their other processor purchases from Intel, Samsung, ARM, etc. They can always threaten to roll their own. So even if they lose some money on the A4, they may be in a better position overall * EDIT: Let me also add that despite what some people are claiming this is likely NOT an ARM, but based on PA Semi's power-efficient flavor of the Power architecture. I believe the Power architecture is in the same family as the Motorola PowerPCs that Apple formerly used and dumped for Intel because of the PowerPC's lower power-efficiency.