Improving on ARM
It seems that the rumours about Apple buying a low-power chip designer were true, only the company in question is Intrinsity rather than ARM.
The NY Times has got confirmation of the acquisition from Apple, which had been rumoured ever since macrumours.com noticed a bunch of Intrinsity employees changing their employer to Apple on the Linked In profiles.
The key technology developed by Intrinsity is something called Fast14 - a set of design tools that apparently allow you to clock microprocessors as higher speeds with lower power consumption. So this acquisition is quite reminiscent of the PA Semi one, in so much as Apple is amassing a bunch of talent and resources geared to producing a superior ARM-based SoC in-house - i.e. the A4.
Intrinsity has already been involved in the design of another new SoC - Samsung's Hummingbird - and there is considerable speculation that some of its technology is already present in the A4. This acquisition is consistent with Apple's strategy of joining the ARM ecosystem by optimising ARM designs, rather than looking to acquire ARM itself.
Here's what Intrinsity CEO Rob Russo had to say when the Samsung partnership was announced in 2008: "Our Fast14 technology delivers both significantly higher operating frequencies with lower power consumption compared to conventional synthesized static logic technologies. We feel that Fast14 technology will play an increasing role in fast, low power design in the future."
Reading around the history of Intrinsity, it looks like ATI licensed some of its technology to speed-up its GPUs way back in 2004. Among the senior engineers at ATI at that time will have been Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri , both of whom have subsequently joined Apple. The plot thickens.
So Apple continues to acquire the tools to make a killer SoC of its own. While it's unlikely that Apple will ever look to sell this chip to third parties, this should still be a major worry for other SoC makers like Qualcomm, TI, NVIDIA, Marvell and Samsung - which until now has had an intimate relationship with Apple on the chip side of things.
The reason they should be worried is that while they may not directly lose sales to the A4 chip, if Apple's mobile devices offer superior performance as well as the attractive design and UI we associate with Apple products, then they're likely to dominate the market even more than they already do - leading to lower sales of devices containing their chips.
