Could Apple Be Secretly Working On A New "Power" Chip With Samsung?
There were reports earlier this year that Apple was designing its own Powerchip. Could Apple be secretly working with Samsung who is the #2 manufacturer of chips behind Intel on the project?. Just asking.
[ 12-13-2002: Message edited by: MacsRGood4U ]</p>
[ 12-13-2002: Message edited by: MacsRGood4U ]</p>
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Apple has Santa and his elves working on a new 980 chip which will be ready by chirstmas. Get your American Express cards ready to order! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
.......or so the germans would have us believe <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
My own guess is that if Apple and Samsung were to collaborate on any major new product, it would probably be some sort of mobile phone. This plays to Samsung's strength. On the other hand, I don't think that Samsung could justify entering the PPC market: it's just not big enough.
<strong>All I want to know is can this "Power" chip make the internet go faster?</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, you need an intel chip for that. They have Netburst technology! Mac g4 chips are optimized for printing homemade greeting cards.
<img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
<strong>Didn't Apple invest in Samsung (might have been someone else) for LCD technology?</strong><hr></blockquote>
yes that's what i heard too...
1) Ties are close between Samsung and Apple, Apple having bought a $100M Samsung bond- the idea was to help Samsung finish building a LCD plant. This bond was slowly paid off over the past few years, and Apple got both priority and Good Deals on LCD displays. The 22" Cinema Display is a good example of that.
2) Samsung used to build Alphas. They _want_ to be a Tier 1 supplier, which means building all chips from small to great. In fact, when DEC was bought by Compaq, one of the big surprises was that Samsung didn't step in to bid for the Alpha design unit, it instead having gone to Intel, along with DEC's fabs.
3) Apple's been looking around for a long time at the many CPUs on the market, and coming-to-the-market. The famous Jobs quote is "We like options." Although one surprise is that Apple hasn't talked with Transmeta (that we know of), although when the Crusoe was first launched, the claim was that a PPC-to-VLIW translator was actually simpler to implement than the IA32-to-VLIW code morphing scheme they currently ship.
So, _if_ Samsung wants to be a Tier 1 vendor and sell CPUs, partnering with Apple guarantees it a large market (in the millions of CPUs per year), they have manufacturing experience with the Alpha which could presumably be applied to a high performance PPC, so the only remaining details are design- and Apple employs a fair number of CMOS engineers as they design their own chipsets, so it's hardly inconceivable for them to put something together.
Of course, the likeliness of this all actually happening is slim to none, and Slim just left town... but I think it's pretty interesting to note that it's not an impossibility.
Yours in prognostication,
-HOS
<strong>then again, the 970 will be much too slow when it'll finally arrive at the end of 2003.</strong><hr></blockquote>
How do you know? Have you seen it in use?
<strong>How do you know? Have you seen it in use?</strong><hr></blockquote>
He probably is basing his conclusions on the assumption that Apple will use it and thus it has to be slow
Sam sung "no, no, no"