Apple iPad announced

Forget risk, I don't think Apple will be able to get it past EU competition commission.

And as you correctly point out, what is in it for them? They are hardly the pushing the CPU envelope. However, if they do, it'll be interesting to see of they stick with Mali or try to buy IMG as well. Intel may not care about ARM buyout, but they'll fight the IMG deal tooth and nail.

 

ROFL

Apple for sure is rumored to buy a whole damn LOT lately: http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/69816.html?wlc=1271843551&wlc=1271844581

Actually why doesn't Apple want Qualcolmm instead of all that, or does Apple have some kind of fetish with companies starting with an "A"? I'm sure some gentlemen in Finland would be delighted to change the office signs for the 4th time in a row

 

Oh well, I might as well stop lurking for one post so that this profoundly absurd discussion stops going entirely in the wrong direction

Here are, nearly certainly, the major changes:
- Infineon 65nm X-Gold 616 Baseband (integrated baseband PMU) with 130nm Infineon UE RF (many fewer external components) linked over DigRF 3G.
- No Baseband SRAM, uses the very rare Shared-DRAM interface (see X-Gold 616 datasheet) that allows the Baseband to share memory even standard LPDDR1. Complicates memory controller scheduling on the app processor quite a bit, but obviously saves space/cost.
- Infineon 65nm XPOSYS GPS chip instead of Infineon 130nm Hammerhead I/II (thse are actually the same silicon). Very small chance they went with the CSR SiRFStarIV instead.
- The Bluetooth/WiFi module is still from Taiwan-based USI but it's a new version, not a rectangle like the iPad. Presumably still using the BCM4329 though, but impossible to be certain.
- Unlike the iPad where the screen was too big for it, they are nearly certainly using the more space-efficient touchscreen solution from the 3GS.

The A4 is on 45nm, unlike the 3GS's SoC but uses the same CPU and GPU. That means it's probably *cheaper* (although there's the extra cost of the 64-bit memory bus) and there's absolutely no reason to speculate on what other processor Apple might be using. And as seems very clear here, footprint of modern phones even with discrete app processors can be very very small.

As silent_guy said, there's not much benefit from integration there. It still makes a lot of sense for Qualcomm or ST-Ericsson though, in which case it should be seen as a partial lock-in strategy: "if you want our application processor, you need to use our baseband", and pricing-wise it's probably fair to see it as mostly a mere bundling advantage going forward (there is a cost benefit, but it's not big).

More interesting, of course, is what Apple plans to do with the VXD375 in the A4 - presumably they couldn't do HD video on the 3GS because they lacked memory bandwidth but that's solved now. I do suspect a bit that VXD375 might be a 720p-only variant of the VXD370, in which case that's what we'll get like on the iPad. We'll see.

 

It's the iPhone 3GS compared to the prototype iPhone 4th generation bought by Gizmodo.

The difference is pretty wild.

Update: Totally ninja'd on that one heh.

 

That seems like a dumb idea to me ... the competition would simply switch to a different architecture over time, making it neither a competitive advantage nor a good investment.

They'd do better buying IMG IMO.

 

What will they gain by buying even IMG?

 

This one's easy: Rys

 

Why buy an entire company when you can just poach an employee?

 

exclusive use of the chipset which seems very powerfull compared to what others are able to offer ?


Wonder what IMG can do linked up to the billions that Apple has

 

I think IMG's architecture and patent portfolio is more valuable as a differentiator than ARM. There are more viable alternatives to ARM than there are to IMG.

ARM's value lies in being the architecture which the market has chose to standardize on, Apple buying it destroys that value ... and merely reduces it to being a decent architecture to build their own processors on. One among many. For that 8 billion is a lot of money.

 

I didn't mean "homogeneous platform" as in "only one hardware platform", I meant as in "as few as possible". Yes, there's always gonna be something newer and better. And yes, app developers probably have to support a hardware generation up to 3 years after it stops selling because of the install base. My point was that IMHO Apple shouldn't grow the install base of the old hardware further after the new generation is released.

Since there's a good chance that we'll see 720p video recording and video chat in the 4th-gen iPhone, I wonder why Apple would not use VXE as well. Are the benefits not worth the extra die-space?

 

IMHO Apple should have picked a MBX and not MBX Lite in the first place for their first generation devices in order to have smaller fill-rate gap. Beyond that and with the introduction of programmable hw things will be a lot easier IMO. Differences between DX7 and DX9 for example are lot larger than DX9 to DX10 or even 11.

No idea if they'll eventually get there, but dedicated ff hw is the best solution for such cases. However video recording on iPhones I've seen to date is anything but bad. I've seen other solutions dropping frames while recording like there's no tomorrow.

Exclusive use sounds like a crappy investment to me. Granted IP companies are typically low risk/low revenue, but exclusivity would mean cutting off all other partners IMG has to date. At the moment they claim integration in 250M units for their IP and their next goal is half a billion units.

If IMG would be available for sale (which I still don't think it is) it would be anything but cheap. To acquire such a company at that price for just Apple devices sounds weird to me. Besides considering that Intel has a healthy stake in the company it doesn't sound that easy.

Depends what hypothetically Apple would use them for.

 

It wouldn't be PA Semi cheap ($278m), but also not ARM expensive ($8b). Market cap is £667m right now, and Apple already owns nearly 10% of it. Apple certainly could afford it without problems (Apple has $10b in cash and $13b in short term investments). And I think Apple could come to an agreement with Intel, since IMHO Intel isn't in it for the long run (they ultimately wanna use their own IP in their MID/smartphone SoCs, but just aren't there yet).

But I think it would only make sense if Apple planned to rely heavily on GPGPU/OpenCL in future iPhoneOS devices and was convinced that IMG was already way ahead of everyone else in the game and had a very strong roadmap.

 

Bears still the question if IMG is available for sale. Besides Imagination Technologies doesn't start with an "A"

Anyway for those interested IMG just added a bunch of videos to the PowerVR Insider section of their demo room: http://www.imgtec.com/demo_room/index.asp
Especially the UI demos are quite nice.

 

You'd need a big saucepan for Rys

 

I don't think they are either. This was more of a "if Apple absolutely wants to spend a few billion and buy a (fabless) chipmaker, it should buy... because of ..." thought experiment. And Apple already uses IMG IP in their iPhone OS devices and owns 10% of the company, so it's not totally far-fetched

Well, maybe Apple got soft on that one. The name just has to have an "A" somewhere in it. Like PA Semi, LAla, QuAttro Wireless

 

Or IMG intends to rename itself to Amagination Technologies

Big guys can carry a LOT of tea pots ya know

 

I'm going to buy IMG and rename it Rysmagination Techlolorys. RYS.L symbol on the LSE, the works.

 

Do you accept investments then? I'd like to finance a high end GPU project

On a more serious note:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/di..._to_Acquire_Microprocessor_Developer_ARM.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/marketforceslive/2010/apr/22/armholdings-marketforces

Well I guess ARM can send the analyst who started the story a couple of beer cases

 

I'm sure he made quite enough off that rumour himself already.