Howard Oakley
With its key hardware components designed by UK companies Arm and Imagination, the iPad’s internals are as British as The Archers.
Archers addicts, like my wife, will find multimode radios such as Pure’s Evoke Flow a source of eternal joy. Not only do they have a choice of traditional FM and novel DAB broadcasts, but once set up with thelounge.com, they can listen to missed episodes without rummaging around the BBC Radio 4 website. Pure, an innovative and successful British firm, happens to be a subsidiary of Imagination Technologies Group, in which Apple owns a 9.5% stake.
As a major shareholder, Apple should be delighted that Pure has recently launched in the US market, but I fancy that radios aren’t the common interest: parent Imagination is the leading developer of graphics and communications chips for mobile devices. Its recent PowerVR SGX545 graphics processor does much that the graphics card in your Mac accomplishes, in a fraction of the space and on precious little power. If the hardware analysts are right, PowerVR designs from Imagination are key components in the iPad’s new A4 ‘System on a Chip’ (SoC).
The essential components for the iPad’s success are its SoC, operating system and interface, and available content. Experience with the iPhone and Apple’s sustained development effort should deliver a mature operating system and interface, while content is up to its staff striking deals behind closed doors. It may seem rather strange to those who have thought of Apple as a mainly software company, but the company succeeded largely because of its innovation in hardware engineering.
The original Mac relied on a clutch of custom chips that allowed its steam-powered 68000 processor to drive a graphical interface, at a time when PCs were still struggling to spatter Ascii text over the screen. The PowerPC processor was developed jointly by engineers from IBM, Motorola and Apple, working in labs in Austin, Texas. The ill-fated Newton, like the runaway successful iPhone, was based on a processor core developed by Arm, a UK CPU developer spun out from Acorn Computers (of BBC Micro fame) on joint funding from Acorn and Apple.
At the time of the Newton, Arm still had a board member from Apple, then Larry Tesler, chief architect of the Newton. Although its stake in Arm has fallen to the point where Apple is no longer a substantial shareholder, Arm processor cores have powered the Newton, the original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS. The latter sports a Cortex-A8 fabricated by Samsung alongside its PowerVR SGX graphics unit. Indeed, Arm cores are at the heart of almost every decent mobile phone, including those sold by Nokia. For the iPad to be able to run iPhone applications, it, too, uses an Arm processor core, claimed to be the latest Cortex-A9.
Arm is one of the most successful examples of a ‘fabless’ chip developer, designing processors and other sophisticated components then licensing them out for other firms to fabricate or to integrate into SoCs and then contract out their fabrication. However, Arm and Imagination aren’t the only fabless developers with which Apple has a close relationship. A couple of years ago, for the modest consideration of $278 million (about £176 million), Apple bought the 150-or-so-strong engineering team and company of PA Semi, specialists since 2003 in designing power-frugal but powerful processors based on the Power Architecture, of which PowerPC processors are a member.
For the moment, the iPad has hardware internals that are as British as The Archers, earning royalties for both Arm and Imagination. Will the next enthralling episode reveal the result of Shula’s relationship with fabless Californian, PA Semi?
