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Yes, reference designs are extremely common nowadays. With something as complex as a motherboard, designing it from scratch is a serious endeavor. There are pro
by blackguardx 15y ago
Yes, reference designs are extremely common nowadays. With something as complex as a motherboard, designing it from scratch is a serious endeavor. There are probably a total of over 20,000 pages of documentation for all the parts on that board. I designed a cabled PCI Express output board for a piece of test equipment and there was over 3000 pages of documentation to sift through.
Also, didn't Apple get Intel to produce a small package, low-voltage processor just for the Air? Did anyone expect them to restrict its use solely for Apple? This is basically a campaign to sell more chips.
- lloeki 15y agoHow come none of the 13/15/17" laptop PC motherboards and internals look like one of a MacBook Pro then? Reference designs allow precisely that: do the heavy "from-scratch" work and allow manufacturers to bend the reference to fit their constraints. Also, didn't Apple get Intel to produce a small package, low-voltage processor just for the Air? It's more probably the usual ULV variant that has existed for every Intel chip since they cared about wattage. I suppose it's more a case of the usual Apple strategy of upfront ordering bucketloads of components, essentially locking the production to themselves.
- robin_reala 15y agoThe original Air had a normal Intel ULV processor in a smaller-than-usual package. Whether this was something Intel came up with and shopped around or something that Apple requested isn’t known.