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Before Apple bought PA Semi and started working on their own A series of System on a Chip (SoC) processors. They were using ARM reference designs before.
by skunkworker 6y ago
Before Apple bought PA Semi and started working on their own A series of System on a Chip (SoC) processors. They were using ARM reference designs before.
- jandrese 6y agoAlso before the boot was totally locked down in encrypted black boxes.
- monocasa 6y agoThen what are they talking about with the Symbian phones? And Apple didn't use ARM reference designs in early iPhones; they were using Samsung SoCs. Pretty much nobody uses the ARM reference designs except as an early prototyping target.
- skunkworker 6y agoYou're right, I forgot that they used underclocked Samsung 1176JZ SoCs.
- als0 6y ago> Pretty much nobody uses the ARM reference designs except as an early prototyping target. This isn't true. The majority of ARM based SoCs today use the Cortex or Neoverse reference designs from ARM. Today there are only a few handful of vendors who fully develop their own core, such as Cavium, Apple, and Ampere.
- monocasa 6y agoThere's a difference between ARM reference designs for SoCs (the topic in question) and ARM's designs for their CPU cores. In the context of reference designs, you see stuff like the ARM Juno designs. I've seen people (very very rarely) just drop those whole designs into their boards. But, like I said, almost nobody uses them except as a prototyping target.
- als0 6y agoI think grandparent comment was referring to the CPU part not whole SoC. Arm has never sold entire SoC beyond a limited number of test chips. Juno is a test/evaluation chip only.
- DeathArrow 6y agoBefore they bought PA Semi, they were helped by Samsung with CPU design. Samsung also fabbed their SOCs. PowerVR designed the GPUs in Apple SOCs.