Interesting Background on the Apple-Designed A6 CPU

Linley Gwennap:

At this point, Apple has spent about $400 million to buy PA Semi and Intrinsity, tens of millions for a license to design its own ARM CPUs, and probably north of $100 million to support its CPU design efforts over the past four years. It appears that the end result will be that Apple ships a Cortex-A15-class CPU about three months before arch-enemy Samsung does. These three months happen to come during the big holiday buying season, during which the iPhone 5 could generate $25 billion in revenue. So that half billion dollars could be money well spent.

As I wrote after the introduction of the original iPad in 2010, Apple is to the post-PC era what Microsoft and Intel combined were in the PC era.

★ Tuesday, 18 September 2012