“The news of [the last] fairly slow week for Apple watchers came in the form of a lawsuit from Apple’s PowerPC partner, IBM, who apparently are trying to protect some chip design IP,” Seth Weintraub blogs for Computerworld. “What are Apple’s intentions with Mr. Papermaster?”
“In the late 90′s Papermaster was one of the main drivers of the PowerPC chip. He likely had lots of interaction with Apple at this point as they were the PowerPC platform’s biggest customer. The PowerPC 630 (or Power3) was ultimately used in IBM mainframe computers but was originally built with the intention of going in desktops – perhaps Apple’s. Papermaster was one of the main architects of this processor,” Weintraub reports. “Since then, he has authored many papers on chip design and is generally regarded as one of the leaders in the chip design field.”
“Then a few years ago, he was put in charge of IBM’s blade server division. I think this point is moot because I don’t think Apple is going after the blade server market. I’d frankly be surprised if they put any more resources into their Xserves or server hardware in general. Apple, the consumer company, just doesn’t spend much in the way on resources on servers,” Weintraub reports.
“PA Semi, the company Apple purchased a few months ago, was going up against IBM in selling PowerPCs (PA Semi’s PWREfficient was in the running to replace the IBM G5 when Apple moved to Intel). PA Semi, as a unit of Apple, is still fulfilling PowerPC contracts for embedded systems for military and other uses,” Weintraub reports. “But will the final product that Apple is working on be a PowerPC processor? Probably not. One of PA Semi’s engineers let slip a few months ago that he is working on an ARM-based processor that will be in future Apple products.”
More in the full article here.
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