Legend of Apple, Arm and DEC(P. A.)

[tempestglen]

When apple was knocked down by IBM&Wintel allied in 1980s. it lost the PC crown, although apple II was the first PC which widely used, and Mac is the first GUI PC. So what? Apple was loser, ironically, Mac is not "PC" anymore.

However, a revenge is never late. Apple and acorn founded Arm holding in 1990, apple wanted to launch Newton PDA whose chip was from Arm. Furthermore, Apple "hired" a master to help his son Arm: DEC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

Usually DEC located in Hudson, Massachusetts, but in order to cooperate with silicon valley in California, A DEC PA(Palo Alto) was founded and leaded by one of the top five senior corporate consulting engineers of DEC: Daniel W. Dobberpuhl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl

He founded and directed the company’s Palo Alto, California Design Center in 1993 where the StrongARM architecture was designed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation

With full lisence from arm, DEC P. A. improved Arm chip vastly by providing Strongarm. What's the apple's role behind this scene?

I've read that apple and moto founded a center in texas to contribute to Strongarm project.

But apple's rebel failed, Newton PDA is an "assistant", not PC itself. The byproducts were the so called smart phones, in fact those Nokia, Palm's phone were PDA with telephone. Natually their semi-smart phones are cleaned up by real smart iPhone since 2007. Copy cat is after all a copy cat.:sneaky:


The close relationship between apple and P. A. was going on, apple once wanted to replace Mac's power chipset with P.A.'s PWRficient processors.

There were rumors that P. A. Semi had a relationship with Apple that suggested Apple would be the premier user of the PWRficient processors. That relationship supposedly ended with the Apple–Intel transition when Apple switched from the Power Architecture to Intel's Core processors for their entire line of computers.[7]

However, Jobs "betrayed " Dobberpuhl, the latter was very angry because P. A. as a small company had already invested a lot into PWRficient processors. P. A. situation was very bad untill apple acquired P. A. in 2008 with some compensation (high buying price).


Jobs then ordered P A group and other acquired chip companies' experts to develope arm cortex microarch and its own microarch parallelly.

Therefore,

ipad (ipad pro) is Newton 2.0
A6 to A9X is Strongarm 2.0.

Intel and AMD, are you ready to face the best SOC design group in the world? Face Strongarm again!

 

[Zodiark1593]

Not sure what OP was trying to get across, but I'll give my thoughts.

If Intel were feeling threatened in the performance space, they'd have seen it back when Apple launched the A7 and would most certainly have acted by now. Intel isn't the sort that would let it's big customers go elsewhere without some sort of fight, and right now, there is little to indicate Intel is doing that in this segment.

Given the exceptional benchmark results A9 puts out, the only reason I can think of that Intel can still sleep at night is possible deficiencies in Apple's architecture that makes it significantly less suited to specific (production related) workloads than Intel's Arch, most likely to improve efficiency in workloads that will occur. Assuming this is true, Apple's Mac line will be x86 based for awhile longer.

Of course, this is just crack-pot speculation on my part. Feel free to disregard it should you desire, though my opinion, I don't believe that ARM is some magic architecture that pwns all. While ISA overhead is lessened, there must be some sacrifice made somewhere for this sort of efficiency and performance.

 

[tempestglen]

Of course intel can sleep at night because apple never sells Ax to others.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Of course intel can sleep at night because apple never sells Ax to others.

Apple is a sizeable customer of Intel. From what I understand, it was partially Apple that got Intel to step up it's gpus so much.

 

[Unoid]

I'd love to see Apple spend a paltry 3-5 Billion and buy up AMD. I'm sre apple could get the x86 license too, or sick anti-trust on Intel.

All their own GPU's and future APUs which being vertically integrated, Apple could make it work better at more profit than using intel.

 

[sm625]

I'd love to see Apple spend a paltry 3-5 Billion and buy up AMD. I'm sre apple could get the x86 license too, or sick anti-trust on Intel.

It's not even worth it. For $3 billion more at this point, Apple could redesign all their software to run on both x86 and ARM. But I believe they've already done this anyway. I think they already have their dev platforms set up to compile ARM at the touch of a button. The transition from x86 to aRM could come swift and fast. A few billion into raw scaling of the A9 cores and GPU to roughly 15W and 35W TDP classes is all they need.

 

[Exophase]

It's not even worth it. For $3 billion more at this point, Apple could redesign all their software to run on both x86 and ARM. But I believe they've already done this anyway. I think they already have their dev platforms set up to compile ARM at the touch of a button. The transition from x86 to aRM could come swift and fast. A few billion into raw scaling of the A9 cores and GPU to roughly 15W and 35W TDP classes is all they need.

It could instead be worth it for the GPU IP and patents.

 

[Idontcare]

It could instead be worth it for the GPU IP and patents.

Absolutely, even if just as a defensive move to reduce chances of patent troll lawsuits down the road.

 

[ehume]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Exophase View Post
"It could instead be worth it for the GPU IP and patents."

Absolutely, even if just as a defensive move to reduce chances of patent troll lawsuits down the road.

In that case, could Apple buy only the ATI piece?

 

[Arachnotronic]

It could instead be worth it for the GPU IP and patents.

ImgTec is probably a better buy in this case than AMD is.