tequila bomb

Apple (Probably) Isn’t Going To Buy ARM

Some clarity on the Palm ARM rumours :

It makes more sense for Apple to join the “soft core” license group (and it’s rumored they already have) than to buy ARM. Buying ARM would not give Apple much of anything other than heartburn on what to do with the hundreds of licensees.

Apple is not a company well suited to taking over another large international group. It doesn’t suit their corporate culture. Typically Apple have always made their own things from scratch, with occasional small acquisitions to augment the resources they already have. Buying ARM would be a radical departure from that tried and tested strategy.

Apple can already make a modified processor “soft core” and tweak the ARM instruction set, as well as use custom cell logic to do things like power and clock gating (to increase performance per watt of power consumption).

It would make more sense for Intel to buy ARM (from Intel’s standpoint). But this would be an anti-trust case in the making due to past monopolistic behavior and anti-competitive business practices. It would also be absolutely horrible for innovation so let’s hope it never happens. I personally think it could happen, but only after Intel is severely weakened by the mobile revolution and fails to gain traction with its Atom CPUs (say in 5 years).

That long?

Steve Cheney has a point though. Which is a shame.

The last bit I quote from him is exactly why I wish Apple would buy ARM. Even though I am pretty sure they won’t. A smart move would be for Apple to buy a larger stake in ARM. Not so much so as to scare off other companies who already rely on them. But enough to keep them safe from a takeover and to keep them “in the fold”.

Apple never controlled PPC so they didn’t get what they wanted and had to switch to Intel.

Remember the G5 PowerBook?
No? Because it never happened. (That was a little joke there!)

Apple now have a similar problem with Intel’s licensing on new CPU architecture that attempts to tie them to Intel’s horrible IGPs. I am assuming that Apple have at least considered buying ARM to make sure that will remain the ideal architecture for iPhone OS devices because of both past and current unpleasant experiences.

Buying ARM would in some ways be similar to their current strategy with regards to their SDK for iPhone development: If Apple can’t fully control the CPU design in their key strategic products (which are mobile devices right now and for the foreseeable future), at the very least they would want to be able to transition smoothly to another architecture if necessary. That strategy, that they are indeed already employing in software, shows they learned from what happened with PPC.

Perhaps because they seem to have succeeded with the SDK approach Apple perhaps don’t feel that ARM is an urgent priority. But I’d love them to buy ARM (or at least a chunk of it) all the same.

Disclosure : I have some shares in ARM!

Cheney also has a nice brief  technical rundown on what ARM’s technology is all about, and how it compares to other designs, particularly PPC (Power PC) used in Macs before Apple moved to Intel…

Technical:

ARM is a low power highly efficient RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture. By comparison, Intel x86 is known as CISC (complex instruction set computer). ARM is not the only RISC architecture – there is also MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC (formerly used in Macs), and others. Intel’s x86 is the only high profile CISC architecture.

CISC/x86 is comprised of hundreds of instructions (individual commands) at the machine code level (assembly language). RISC-based CPUs (ARM) use much fewer instructions – only dozens.

There are all kinds of business and technical reasons why ARM is “better” for the mobile market. Here is probably the biggest technical reason:

RISC instructions are fixed-length, while CISC instructions vary in length. This means that the fetch/decode process for RISC is more efficient (better use of memory resources etc). The results in a more efficient “pipeline”, which means lower power consumption and better battery life.