Steve Jobs made an interesting disclosure to the NY Times yesterday while talking about the remarkable Grand Central technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that will allow programmers to get more power out of multicore computers and also to use GPUs for additional performance. In the midst of such talk, he announced for the very first time the reason that Apple purchased processor-maker PA Semiconductor in April.
“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.
Many had speculated that future iPhones could run on Intel silicon, or that PA Semi had been purchased just to recruit some of its talented engineers. Steve says otherwise. Apple’s getting into the mobile processor game. Two years from now, all our iPods and iPhones might be running on their hardware. And if PA’s stuff is as good as everyone says, such exclusive hardware could maintain the competitive advantage that software already offers the iPhone.
4 responses to “Jobs Claims PA Semiconductor Will Make iPhone, iPod Chips”
What’s with “Snow Leopard?” It sounds like a 10.5.x release, not the discussed 10.6. Sure, it’s semantics, but considering the crap we all give Microsoft for their different flavors of Vista this sounds like a tweaked 10.5.
They could call it Puma, and have the Smothers Brothers do ads. Or Cougar, with Demi Moore. Maybe Cheetah, since it’s supposed to be for multi-processor systems. Or call it Cyvet and do a cross-promotion with Starbucks (there’s a big, esoteric “ewwww!” in there for you coffee fanatics).
Apple should be careful not to tire us out and make us lose interest with all these semantics. Save the big cat names for the big releases, not tweaked versions of the same thing. I’m still on 10.4.11. Is this bad? Am I missing out? ;)
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