Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is building up a secret army that will help them develop chips for future Apple products. Apple’s recent appointment of Raja Koduri from AMD, more than 100 Apple employees on Linkedin having past experience in the semiconductor industry and job postings with descriptions like “testing the functional correctness of Apple developed silicon” clearly indicate that the Cupertino company is onto something big.
According to few people familiar with the issue, there are multiple reasons for Apple to go with in-house development. First, it can improve on its products; second, the improvements and developments remains confined to the walls of their company; and third, no other company would be able to replicate it or sell it to its competitors.
It is also said that Apple will mostly use these internally developed chips to power iPod Touch or iPhones that could help them to drastically reduce power consumption, enhance battery life as well as make the devices handle advanced graphics and hi-definition content.
However, these chips could take as less as a year to come out, which implies that maybe a couple of iterations of iPod Touch and iPhone will still integrate a Samsung’s ARM based microprocessor.
[Via WSJ]
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