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Beware, for this article includes a gem like this: Instead, these companies turned to a standard called ARM. Created by a once-obscure British company, it was
by hga 11y ago
Beware, for this article includes a gem like this:
Instead, these companies turned to a standard called ARM. Created by a once-obscure British company, it was designed from the ground up for low-power mobile uses.
Nope, their price budget required plastic instead of ceramic packaging, which had a 1 watt power budget. They were sufficiently conservative that it ended up dissipating 1/10 of a watt. The usefulness for mobile applications came later.
On the other hand, if Intel turned down an offer from Apple to supply the iPhone CPU, well, that sounds like a mistake. Then again, it's such a different business that it's not clear it would have worked for them, especially given the opportunity cost. So different, their FPGA aquisition Alteria is still having their lower end more price sensitive chips fabricated by TSMC, apparently because Intel is just too expensive for that market.
And Apple could well have changed to ARM later, Macs are now on their third CPU architecture.
- bsder 11y ago> The usefulness for mobile applications came later. True, but not quite the whole story. Some enterprising engineers wrote a cellular protocol stack in ARM assembly language that let everybody use a far cheaper core than anything else. Very quickly, ARM became entrenched in the feature phones. Then, the evolution occurred to smartphones, and ARM was already in the phone.
- elcct 11y agoMaybe it is good that Intel turned down that offer, because otherwise now we could have desktop sized iPhones with built in winter warmers.