Apple goes back to PowerPC? (and 41 hours)

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Apple buys processor designer PA Semi -- an unexpected move that has people scratching their heads, seeing as the company uses the POWER architecture. Not to mention video of a poor guy stuck in an elevator for nearly two days...

Gregg Keizer reports:

Apple Inc. has agreed to buy P.A. Semi Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., a microprocessor design company known for its high-end, low-power chips ... [for] $278 million ... P.A. Semi was founded in 2003 by, among others, Dan Dobberpuhl, a 20-year veteran of chip design at Digital Equipment Corp. ... P.A. Semi counts 150 employees and includes engineers who have worked for Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. The company's current processor line, dubbed "PWRficient," includes the PA6T-1682M, a low-power, 64-bit, dual-core chip that features two memory controllers and 2MB of L2 cache. The company's processors are based on IBM's Power microprocessor architecture ... Apple relied on PowerPC chips for its personal computers until it abandoned them in early 2006 for Intel's microprocessors. more

Seth Weintraub is shocked; shocked, I tell you:

Apple astounded just about everyone today ... Dobberpuhl, also has a history of designing StrongARM chips - the kind currently in use in the iPod Touch and iPhone - from his former work at DEC. StrongARM, which was sold to Intel and became the foundation for the XScale family, was one of the first high-performance energy-efficient processors ... Whether Apple is after the StrongARM expertise or PowerPC processors, don't look for these chips to go into traditional desktops. These chips are more likely to hit high end iPhones, iPods and tablet devices in the coming months and years ... The P.A. Semi purchase leaves Intel's Atom Processor out of the mix as well. Many rumor websites had incorrectly predicted that Atom was the next generation Apple ultra-portable chip. more

Cleve Nettles feels stung by the unexpected move: [You're fired -Ed.]

Wow, we didn't see this coming at all. Apple buys PA Semi, a fabless chip company that specializes in high performance, low power PowerPC based processors ... This means that Apple's long term strategy includes the PowerPC platform? In their handhelds - iPods and iPhones? Will we see a 2Ghz PowerPC iPhone in the future? ... what about the Intel Atom? Lots of questions we'll hopefully get answers to later today. Or maybe Apple just bought PA Semi for their talent and expects the new company to help integrate chips into Apple products. Still. Wow. more

John Timmer adds:

Correctly guessing that power use would become an increasingly significant factor due to rising energy prices and an increasingly mobile world, the company designed an impressively efficient chip, the PA6T-1682M. The dual-core chip has two 64-bit, out-of-order PowerPC processors, two memory controllers, and a host of system-on-a-chip features, including PCI-E and Ethernet controllers ... When the chip was first announced, it seemed like the obvious choice for letting Apple laptops escape from the G4 era, and a number of reports suggested that Apple was in talks with PA Semi about their use. All of that came crashing to an end when Apple went with Intel, ostensibly for performance per watt reasons. more

Brian Lam has some insider goss.:

The negotiations, which finished recently, took place in The Steve's home. Owning its own chip design is an interesting move. While the iPhone's had a lot of off the shelf componentry, it makes sense that working on its own internal hardware could yield better devices ... last year [they] announced a 64-bit dual core processor that is said to be about 300% more efficient than the nearest competition, using only 5 to 13 watts at 2GHz ... it is reported that Dobberpuhl was furious when [Apple] went x86, thinking the Intel talks were just a bargaining chip. Some think that P.A. Semi lost its chance to be a brand name like AMD or Intel, but clearly, being under the brand name of Apple isn't half bad. more

Dean Takahashi agrees:

I suppose this is only fair, since Apple ruined PA Semi’s original business plan ... PA Semi can deliver unique chips and hardware that no one else can make ... [it] specialized in making high-performance low-power chips through techniques such as clock-gating. That technique inserts a gate in between different parts of the chip; those parts can then be isolated so that they can be turned off if they’re not needed. That helps save power ... It had key architects such as Jim Keller and Pete Bannon, who worked on Digital Equipment Corp.’s Alpha processors as well as the StrongArm design ... P.A. Semi had raised $126.5 million in venture funding, including from Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, TI Ventures, Focus Ventures and Venrock. more

But Sramana Mitra worries about risk:

My primary reaction to this announcement is a very mixed feeling. I am not concerned about Intel so much, as I am concerned about Apple itself, and its ability to manage this additional level of complexity that one more layer of vertical integration brings on. Yes, I see the advantages. A new ultra low-power, ultra-high performance processor is needed to sustain the needs of the new category of devices that will replace laptops, integrate cell-phones, but will, at the same time, be powerful miniature multi-core computers. Apple wants to own the brains of this product, and not have to share. Very well, if all goes well. But Apple has introduced great risk in its execution abilities. more

And finally...

• Nicholas White was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours
  

Buffer overflow:

• Mike McBride: Indexing of tape backups?
• Phil Windley: Runaway Daemons in OS X
• Todd Ogasawara: Is the Closed Source Inevitable?
• Schneier on Security: The RSA Conference
• Network Security Blog: Fighting Botnets with botnets
• Adam Ostrow: Twitter’s Lead Architect Leaves: It’s Not You, It’s Me
• The Old New Thing: The contradictory dialog: Click Finish to begin

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Seth Weintraub: Apple does it again. Record Q2 2008
• Eric Lai: Negroponte says OLPC is 'scaling up' Sugar kids' software platform
• SJVN: Can CAPTCHA be saved?
• Preston Gralla: Live Mesh: Microsoft's replacement for Windows?
• Mark Hall: SaaS vs S+S
• Douglas Schweitzer: Rating and selling video games
• Shark Tank: Need to know? Yes!
• Shark Bait: Removing hard drive data -- the YouTube way

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• The OLPC resignations continue (and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA)
• Velociraptor bites into hard drive market (and Error'd)
• Big phishing problem "bears fruit" at Toorcon (and he's dead, Jim)