Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 23rd Apr 2008 11:19 UTC, submitted by Francis Kuntz
Does anyone remember the chip start-up P.A. Semi? This company made its rounds around the internet in 2005, when it lifted the veil of secrecy on a new, highly efficient PowerPC processor it had been working on. 2005 Being the year that Apple announced its switch to Intel, people started to doubt Apple's reasons. A few months later, in May 2006, it became known that Apple had been working with P.A. Semi right before Apple made the switch. P.A. Semi released their chip a year later, and now the company has been bought by... Apple.
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Member since:
2006-01-23
Now they buy this company? Does that mean Apple is gonna play catchup?
It doesn't work well on my PowerPC-based machine but it's hardly crippled. Apple have already made their application software incompatible with PowerPC-based machines, so they're not thinking of computers, per se.
They point is that the company is designing processors. They've got some good ideas and certainly made some progress in efficiency in what was already an efficient design.
If Apple can use them to design their own portable device processors, they won't be stuck with Intel, Broadcom, or Samsung or any other company supplying the general market. That said, they shouldn't be stupid enough to make things proprietary and work themselves out of flexibility.