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Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era
- xxcode 15y agothe 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team) was about 20 people (and they were hiring 3-4 more), so this is somewhat difficult to believe, but I might have outdated information.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.
- kierank 15y agothe text of the article doesn't seem to explain how the assertion is made. It's techcrunch so of course the number was pulled out of the author's backside.
- reinhardt 15y agoMore like the backside of someone else that (allegedly) heard it by SJ and (allegedly) forwarded it to the techcrunch author.
- adamjernst 15y agoI've heard stories about small US divisions backed by large, less talented divisions overseas to carry out the rote work. Maybe that's the case here?
- seltzered_ 15y agothere's also the Intrinsity acquisition in austin, but I doubt it's a super huge team. I pass by their building every day, it isn't big or anything.
- smackfu 15y agoThe source is some dude the reporter talked to who says Steve Jobs said it. This is journalism?
- alain94040 15y ago1,000 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 15y agoWikipedia 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.
- andrewtbham 15y agoIs the subtext of the article wearable computers?
- dlss 15y agoIt's got to be something like that. Otherwise it would be a complete waste of resources. (5% of non-retail staff would be something like 10%+ of all engineering staff...)
- mahyarm 15y agoThe iPod Nano. They even sell 3rd party watch cases for it.
- ugh 15y agoWhat do you mean? Smartphones are obviously wearable computers and they already exist.
- andrewtbham 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer
- ugh 15y agoHuh? Seems pretty clear from that that smartphones are obviously wearable computers.
- hugh3 15y agoThey'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 15y agoExactly. 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.
- illumen 15y agoFluff piece.
- alexhaefner 15y agoAgreed. 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.
- clistctrl 15y agoWith steve gone, I wonder if there's a future of Apple selling any excess chips for lower quality market competitors.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago"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!
- reinhardt 15y ago"mobile" is old school. Apparently they're talking about the "post mobile" era but we wouldn't understand anyway.
- erikpukinskis 15y agoThe 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 15y ago"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-laptopnotebook/ http://jseliger.com/2008/12/26/computer-post-desktop-or-lapt... .
- maxklein 15y agoHow 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).
- timerickson 15y agoYou'll likely have multiple R&D teams competing against each other, with support teams for each. Don't forget to include operations, assembly, shipping, and any teams directly needed to support this research and development of new chips. It's not inconceivable that Apple would have many teams working on many different ideas and designs that compete with each other. Apple is brilliant at understanding you need to disrupt yourself, before other companies disrupt you.
- tptacek 15y agoThough it makes sense that 1000 people on one component is an unrealistic estimate, your logic here is a caricature. How many different groups of people are, for instance, involved in a single game title? Similar dynamics in chip production: you have design teams, verification teams, tools teams, and support staff for 3-4 levels of functionality. And that's before you start picking apart the system-on-a-chip stuff, which involves design and verification for all the components that the processor talks to, and tooling, layout, &c.
- stonemetal 15y agoThey 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 15y agoThat's what I thought. Also, memory chips, LCD display and power controllers, Thunderbolt... those can make a lot of difference in an Apple product.
- raganwald 15y agoWhat 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 15y agoMany 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 15y agoMost 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?
- jmaygarden 15y agoI immediately thought of Delphi as well, but there are also numerous other counter-examples to the grandparent post. For example, I had a Plymouth in the 90's with an engine built in collaboration with Mitsubishi.
- gardarh 15y agoSometimes 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore ?
- wmf 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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.
- gurkendoktor 15y agoI don't think customers care much about that, not even those who defended their non-Intel Macs until the bitter end. To be more than anecdotal, the iPhone 4S site lists the "Dual-core A5 processor" as both the first bullet item, and later as its own slide. Surprising given that tech specs are said to be obsolete. But I think it's more about the dual-core, and it doesn't mention that it's an Apple processor.
- gardarh 15y agoLet 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/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos%204210 http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/product... - well they have to, opposed to Apple they're selling the chip seperately.
- skimbrel 15y agoIf 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 15y agoThey 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 15y agoNo 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 15y ago>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".
- Geee 15y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they pulled out a high-performance ARM chip (more cores) to completely replace x86. Someone's got to do it, right? Windows 8 is also headed in this direction with support for both ARM and x86, but all current ARM-chips are low-power low-performance and can't compete with x86.
- mcantelon 15y agoWill 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?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Andys 15y agoWill Intel finally have some real competition?
- ams6110 15y agoI 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.
- meric 15y agoIt's coming! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693
- rohern 15y agoI'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".