Alex Watson
Now the iPad is out, the CPU that powers it has been unmasked, so exactly how much of the A4 was really designed by Apple in California?
Steve Jobs once declared that the problem with Microsoft was that ‘they have no absolutely no taste… I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way’. Apple, by contrast, was staffed by ‘musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.’
Whether this is true – taste isn’t exactly objectively measurable – traditionally there was an even bigger and simpler distinction between Microsoft and Apple: Apple made hardware, Microsoft didn’t. While Microsoft has started to produce its own kit (Xbox 360 and Zune), manufacturing products just isn’t in its DNA. With Windows Phone 7, the company is going back to its comfort zone, selling licences for the OS and letting Samsung, LG and the rest make the kit.
Apple, on the other hand, makes most of its cash from hardware, and there’s no sign of that changing – if anything, the company seems intent on pushing ever deeper into the design and manufacturing of hardware. It seems determined to show that it not only designs the exterior of its devices, but that their guts are Apple-made, too, as in both the keynotes at which Jobs introduced the iPad and iPhone 4, he gave prominent mentions to the fact they’re powered by the Apple A4.
In the first Mac to the Future column, we covered the basics of the A4. Apple doesn’t own any CPU manufacturing plants (‘fabs’, in industry parlance) as they’re fearsomely expensive. Instead, it looks to a third party to manufacture the chip – in Apple’s case, Samsung. Apple also licenses the basic design of the CPU from a British company called Arm, the same approach many other smartphone manufacturers take. So what about the A4 justifies Apple’s confidence in branding it as its own CPU?
A lot of interesting information has come to light since the iPad’s launch, and since we last looked at the chip. First, we now know it’s a single-core design – not entirely surprising, given the iPad’s excellent battery life. We also know that the A4 is based on ARM’s Coretex A8 design, as opposed to the newer A9. The latter is optimised for multi-core usage and speeds of up to 2GHz – it’s certainly powerful, but has yet to be used in any high-profile mobile product.
While Apple turned away from ARM’s bleeding-edge A9 design, it still wanted pace for the iPad and future iPhones, and until the last 12 to 18 months Coretex A8 chips typically ran at a maximum speed of 650MHz. According to the website AnandTech, Apple, together with Samsung, turned to a small Texas-based ARM chip company called Intrinsity in its quest to get A8 to go faster. Founded in 1997, it had experienced 10 years of little success and a lot of venture capital money until Apple and Samsung came calling. Intrinsity signed a deal with Samsung and Apple to work on pushing Coretex A8 chips as fast as possible, and created a chip called Hummingbird – a 1GHz Coretex A8 design.
The only downside of this approach for Apple was it had to share the resulting goods with Samsung. Analysis by Young Choi at UBM TechInsights reveals that the Apple A4 and Samsung’s less snappily named S5PC110 chip (which will power Samsung’s Wave phone) share the same ARM core, the 1GHz Hummingbird. Apple’s response? In April, it purchased Intrinsity outright – showing its interest in pushing ARM’s Coretex design as fast as possible and how highly it rated the Intrinsity team’s work on that project.
It’s clear Apple did have input into the A4 then, if only in terms of setting a specific objective and finding a third party to hit its target. As the writers for EE Times pointed out in their article on the tech specs of the A4 (see tinyurl.com/macusera4 if you want to read the whole piece), the CPU core is only part of the A4. It’s a whole system on a chip and they speculate that further custom work went into the arrangement of the extra blocks such as graphics. The A4 and S5PC110 aren’t exactly identical outside of the CPU core.
A further question is why Apple decided to purchase Intrinsity and what it really gains from the acquisition. While pushing the ARM A8 design to 1GHz required work, Intrinsity had already completed the 1GHz Hummingbird before Apple bought it, so Samsung will be able to use it in tablets and smartphones. Hummingbird wasn’t the only 1GHz Coretex A8, either: both Texas Instruments and Qualcomm have succeeded in that area, and as a result, HTC and Motorola both have 1GHz phones either out now or imminent.
The battle will now surely move to Coretex A9 – Motorola has already hinted it will have a 2GHz phone before the end of the year, so it seems a pretty safe bet to assume this is an A9-based product. Apple does now have a significant amount of ARM CPU engineering expertise in-house, and Intrinsity was believed to be working on a version of the A9 that used the same approach it took to boost the A8.
Coretex A9 is a faster design than A8, so it may be a while before such optimisation is needed – perhaps it’s not speed that Apple wants, but battery life. HTC’s 1GHz phone, the Evo 4G, which uses a Qualcomm-based Coretex A8, reportedly has bad battery life, with some reports stating it fails to make it through a day on a full charge. Of course, you can’t lay the battery life solely at the door of the CPU (the Evo has an enormous 4.3in screen, for instance), but it will be interesting to compare a 1GHz Apple phone to a rival model. As phone chips get faster, battery life will become more of an issue – especially as battery technology really isn’t advancing at anything like the rate of chip technology.
It may also be the case that Apple’s acquisition of Intrinsity was driven not just by engineering logic, but by marketing. As I’ve written previously in Mac to the Future, Steve Jobs seems to relish the opposition between Apple’s high-value hardware experience and Google’s ‘software as a service, hardware as cheap as possible’ mantra. As it becomes clear that the touchscreen ‘slate’ design is going to be the way smartphones look, being able to brand the innards of an Apple product is another way to differentiate it from the competition.
Finally, it’s also highly possible that Apple’s move was driven by the passion – or, to his detractors, megalomania – of one Mr Jobs. As I wrote at the start of this column, not only is making stuff deeply ingrained in Apple’s DNA, but so is a sense of superiority, of ‘we can do this better’. Maybe Steve simply believes that if Apple made every last bit of the iPhone, it really would be a superior device.
