“Apple says it bought P.A. Semi to get its hands on some patents and a bunch of very bright engineers who are already used to working together. I’m sure that’s true – but they also got an irresistible opportunity to shake the money tree while doing something good for the country,” Paul Murphy blogs for ZDNet.
“P.A. Semi designs PPC chips primarily for advanced military and robotics applications and the one they talk about in public, the PA6T-1682M, has had an unprecedented uptake in the industry – so much so that major defense contractors include Lockheed Martin and Curtis-Wright have locked in ten year supply contracts on it,” Murphy writes. “The chip itself is impressive: it’s a 15 watt, 2+Ghz, dual core, dual Altivec, 64bit PPC “system on a chip” with 2MB of level 2 cache per core, hardware packet management (including cryptology), on board memory busing, and eight concurrent PCI/E channels.”
“Why would Apple use it in a laptop? Because Apple has been facing pressure from U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) customers for more secure (i.e. non x86) gear that’s made in America and because all of P.A. Semi’s big customers are long term experts at selling to the DOD. In other words, what Apple really wanted here was technical expertise, but what they got along with it was specific market expertise and a golden opportunity to sell from three to five hundred thousand American made, PPC based, MacOS X machines to the DOD every year,” Murphy writes.
Paul Murphy is betting that Apple will make PPC laptops again. Read the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: 3Ghz within a year!