William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

So the rumor is true, and Apple has indeed bought Intrinsity. Apple confirmed to The New York Times today what Linkedin profile updates have already indicated, with Intrinsity’s employees naming Apple as their new employer. As for the price, NYT cites MPR’s Tom Halfhill, who claims that the purchase price was $121 million. Halfhill has been around the processor scene since forever, and he has great sources, so this number is probably in the ballpark.

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[From Apple purchase of Intrinsity confirmed]

It’ll be a while before these moves result in products.

Best piece I’ve read on the whole thing, by a long shot. Must-read.

★

[From Louis Gerbarg on Apple, Adobe, Game Interpreters, and Section 3.3.1

This topic has attracted a lot of interesting commentary.

Want a a simple, single-paragraph on what the Apple/Adobe iPhone spat is all about? Jean Louis Gassee supplies it: “Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe and other cross-platform application development tools control his I mean the iPhone OS future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.” I think it really is that simple.

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[From The best summary of the Apple/Adobe war]

Microsoft wants Flash dead too, but they are more constrained in what they can say and do about it than Apple.

The iPhone OS 4.0 event just wrapped up and the faithful are filing out of the Apple venue with a slightly shell-shocked look. What happened? Oh nothing, just multi-tasking, iAd, a huge Mail update and a bunch of other stuff. Yes, the long-awaited OS update for the iPhone has just been run down and we’ve got all the details. Here, in handy bullet point form, are all the things you need to know about iPhone OS 4.0… Continue reading[From Everything You Need To Know About iPhone OS 4.0]

I suppose I’ll be downloading the beta on Sunday.

Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple’s custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it’s clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple’s prior acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we’ve gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the extracting wizards over at iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it’s packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually inside of the A4 processor package, and we’re expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there’s still much debate on whether Apple’s own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm’s heralded 1GHz Snapdragon, the chip powering Google’s Nexus One among other things. AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it’s impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more — we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | AnandTech | Email this | Comments [From Apple’s A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test]

That’s very interesting. How custom is this chip? Apple does have an architecture license for ARM that allows them to tweak the chip design.