“Apple has bought the company that many analysts say helped make the brain in the iPad tablet, people familiar with the deal said Tuesday,” Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone report for The New York Times.
“Apple has finalized a deal to acquire a small chip company called Intrinsity, Apple confirmed,” Vance and Stone report. “Intrinsity, of Austin, Tex., made a name for itself by creating a fast chip for mobile devices in cooperation with Samsung, both a partner and competitor to Apple. Many experts in the chip industry have speculated that Apple relied on Intrinsity’s chip as the basis for the main engine behind its new iPad… Intrinsity’s Hummingbird product is thought to be the main computational engine behind the A4.”
“‘Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we do not comment on our purpose or plans,’ said Steve Dowling, a spokesman at Apple,” Vance and Stone report. “Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst with Microprocessor Report, said he believed the acquisition price was $121 million.”
Full article here.
@doulie
keep your stories straight. Intrinsity isn’t ARM
Seeing that Samsung produces 2 or 3 Hummingbird products already, what does this do to the Apple/Samsung relationship? Either Apple will either A) allow this to continue or B) Snuff it out completely. If choice B, Samsung who is currently producing Apple’s iphone chips might less than thrilled
It makes total sense for Apple to produce their own chips for mobile devices that they can tailor to their needs. It makes less sense for them to make desktop or laptop general processing chips.
The only thing that might drive them to a more custom system is Intel insisting on using there own video and blocking Nvidia out. I think that pressure from Apple and the threat to team up with AMD will keep Intel making chips Apple can use.
Cheap as chips!
This is very cool! Go Apple! 😀
I have friends who have been at Intrinsity since the beginning. Good for them! What you don’t realize is that most of the original Intrinsity designers came from Motorola, both the 68K and 88110 days, which predated PowerPC. Most of them were involved with PowerPC or the network chips. So there is a long history of them working with Apple, and the relationship goes back more than 20 years.