Apple latest Chip gamble
Thursday, April 24, 2008

Imagine in a future product of Apple, back in Power. (huh?). The company has already made major bets on Power, x86, ARM just this decade, and now they are planning to go back in Power again? What, no love for SPARC or MIPS?

Apple has paid P.A. Semi for 278 million usd for a new chip design, for mobile device to be exact, currently PA. Semi's PA6T-1682M is a great contender for the iPhone's current chip Samsung's ARM-620mhz processor.

According to some rumors, like Forbes reported that Apple plans to put its chips inside the iPhone, but several possibilities are being considered this morning, as the industry tries to digest this piece of news.

Here is the specs of the said processor:

The P.A Semi PA6T-1682M system-on-chip integrates two 2 GHz CPU cores, DDR2 memory controllers, 1 GbE/10 GbE Ethernet MACs, offload engines, 8 PCIe controllers and 24 configurable SerD • Two 64-bit power-efficient superscalar out-of-order Power Architecture CPUs offer high-end processing capabilities at modest power dissipation • Two integrated memory controllers provide low-latency access to DDR2-400/533/667/800/1066 memory banks • An integrated 2 MB L2 cache provides substantial on-chip storage for code and data • A configurable, coherent I/O subsystem provides a choice of high-speed serial I/Os, including PCI Express, 10 GbE, and 1 GbE • A sophisticated demand-balancing DMA controller and associated offload engines provide efficient data movement and processing, including encryption, checksum computations, and streaming XOR generation • Virtualization features support multiple different operating systems simultaneously on each CPU and industry-standard hypervisors

Apple's iPhone group almost assuredly doesn't want P.A. Semi's current product. The PWRficient PA6T-1682M is the only product listed on P.A. Semi's Web page. It's a dual-core 64-bit chip designed for high-performance computing and embedded applications--things like server appliances or sophisticated telecommunications gear.

Labels: Apple, iphone, Power, Processor, Samsung

Posted by Karlo @ 4/24/2008 10:44:00 AM
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