Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era

What 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's not a given that Apple will <i>necessarily</i> 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.<p>But it is certainly beautiful to watch them try to sail the opposite tack.

Sometimes 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: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore</a> ?

the 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team) was about 20 people (and they were hiring 3-4 more), so this is somewhat difficult to believe, but I might have outdated information.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.

If 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.<p>(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.)

How can you even have 1000 people designing a chip? A micro-processor is not <i>THAT</i> 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).

Fluff piece.

I 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.<p>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.<p>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.

I'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".

Is the subtext of the article wearable computers?

It's coming! <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693</a>

Will Intel finally have some real competition?

With steve gone, I wonder if there's a future of Apple selling any excess chips for lower quality market competitors.

Will 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?

"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!