If you can remember, Apple bought a company called PA Semiconductor in April for close to $300 million. It gave us an idea that the firm’s chips were going to make their way into next-gen iPhones, but Apple was silent on the subject, not until their employee, Wei-han Lien, posted a description of his current duties in Apple, which is managing the ARM CPU architecutre team for the iPhone on LinkedIn.
The fact that Lien is managing a team for the architecture of ARM CPU for the iPhone means that Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi was to build optimized processors in-house for the iPhone instead of purchasing them from Samsung, like the company does now.
By developing its own ARM variant, Apple could create a processor that meets the specific needs of the iPhone and iPod, building support for functions such as the touch screen or scroll wheel into silicon and possibly savings on costs by reducing the number of processors needed in each device. In addition, Apple’ will be able to maintain tighter controls on who knows what about its future products by disposing of an outside chip supplier.
“They could put software accelerators on there or maybe do something like a graphics engine,” said Fred Weber, the former chief technology officer of Advanced Micro Devices and current chief executive of memory specialist Metaram. [via NYTimes]
Looks like we are going to see some more surprises from Apple. This kind of news makes me excited about the gadgets they are going to release in the future.
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