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Except Apple purchased PA Semiconductor and designed the A8 chip in-house. Samsung fabricates it.
by redrobot5050 16y ago
Except Apple purchased PA Semiconductor and designed the A8 chip in-house. Samsung fabricates it.
- vetinari 16y agoYou mean A4, not A8. Cortex A8 was not designed by PA. Even A4 "designed by Apple" SoC contains many blocks from Samsung catalogue and PowerVR SGX GPU from Imagination Technologies. They built a lego set, they didn't start on green grass field.
- redrobot5050 16y agoAll SoC design comes from a fabricator's toolkit. When you do VLSI Design or Verilog layout, you always feed the compiler a "technology file" which describes -- gasp -- building blocks of what is possible to synthesize from the builder's fab. So yeah, apple didn't start out by implementing digital circuits with vacuum tubes. Thank you for that insightful comment.