It's pretty clear that Apple's A4, using technology from PA Semi that it owns, signals a sign that the company is serious about using its energy and resources to design chips.
But MacNews.com, a new magazine, speculates that there could be much more than just dabbling with the idea.
We already know that Apple has two ex-ATI chief technology officers working on something or other in Cupertino. They won't be twiddling their fingers, that's for sure.
The author of the piece in Macnews.com speculates that in five years time Mac OS X will run on nothing but Apple designed microprocessors, and suggests that Apple doesn't want to have all its eggs in the Intel basket.
Even AMD has become a fabless design company, despite its founder Jerry Sanders III proclaiming on every possible occasion that only real men have fabs.
Apple won't be building $2 billion fabs, that's for sure. Macnews.com is here.
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That's a super efficient combo, and will make for a great performance boost.
The handheld/embedded space is a different animal as the IP is not controlled by a fab company. i.e. ARM rules embedded space versus Intel in the desktop/laptop/server space. Apple can leverage design expertise to improve ARM designs, but does not have the same ability with x86. The design intensity are also several generations apart. The current embedded chips approximate x86 designs from 5-6 years ago.
Intel and AMD have been improving on their designs for years, resulting in a lot of ip that they can draw from. Trying to design a good processor from scratch will be next to impossible. Unless they decide to make it incredibly simple and contain many cores, and force the programmers to do all the work, that could work.
These guys know what they are up to and will be the one to watch for years to come, as long as Jobsy doesn't drop.
Apple have been showing signs that they are serious of building walled garden. First they had iTunes and iPod. Then developed iPhone OS and iPhone and now they have iPad using iPhone OS.
So they have pushed this idea of walled garden up stream in their product portfolio. I'm quite sure that in future they will add "new" iMac to their portfolio. I mean home office machine (iWorks, HW keyboard ... more power, multitasking etc) using iPhone OS. iPad doesn't replace iMacs or iPhones (Steve said so).
Why iPhone OS? Because OS X is too open. I feel like Apple is building product portfolio for average families (this means also cheaper products) that all use iPhone OS. These products would be thightly integrated to iTunes and this way to content that Apple provides.
This way there could be homes and families (as there already is individuals today) who use only closed Apple products. So they would have to buy the new Apple product to replace older because all their older electric consumption (bookshelf, music library, newspaper subscriptions etc.) is tied to Apple platform.
This leads to the chips. I have read that you can run Java on iPhone - on jailbraked iPhone. This is possible because ARM processor some how supports Java. So I assume that it could be possible to liberate the content from Apple garden.
So developing own chips Apple can make sure that their programs will take all the advantage of processor. But somehow I feel that one reason is that it will close the Apple ecosystem even more.