Democratizing designs

Apple using its internally designed chip A4 in iPad has the potential for shaking up the semicon design industry. Chip designs have always been esoteric. OEMs, including Apple, have generally opted for off-the-shelf chips. Apple’s iPhone and iPod use chips partly based on ARM designs and made by Samsung. Apple chose Motorola’s 68k series to power its Macs. In 1990s when Motorola failed to deliver a 68k processor as fast and efficient as Intel’s Pentium, Apple migrated its Macs to PowerPC. When PowerPC could not keep pace with Intel’s Pentium IV and AMD’s Athlon, Apple switched its Mac to Intel’s Core series.

Huge surprises
To the industry Apple has always given huge surprises, of which I think A4 is the biggest. Apple has now evolved into a semicon design company. The first sign of this evolution appeared in 2008 when Apple acquired PA Semi, a Silicon Valley semicon start-up employing 150 designers. Apple is known to be secretive in revealing its business plans. Jobs tried to dispel any doubt of going into semicon design by saying that the acquisition was to help Apple products run on more sophisticated software.

Designers are speculating whether A4 is a new SoC design or an ARM chip derivative. Apple is an investor in ARM and has a license to make enhancements to ARM chips. A4 runs at 1GHz, which is higher than most ARM-based chips. Apple has expectedly remained silent on the issue, and so has Foxconn, which manufactures iPad, along with iPhone and iPod.

A great achievement of A4 is the integration of CPU with GPU. Till recently CPU and GPU were separate hardware pieces. But with miniaturization many designers are working on integration. Intel’s Larrabee project tried it, but Intel missed its benchmarks, and Larrabee may not see a wide release. Intel is attempting integration in yet another project, Moorestown. Though demonstrated at CES, Moorestown is yet far from reaching the market. Nvidia’s Tegra, with applications in Google’s Chrome OS-based netbook and media players, has CPU-GPU integration, but Nvidia is a chipset provider and cannot decide full specifications in contrast to Apple’s total control over iPad.

With A4 Apple has not only crossed a new design milestone with impeccable CPU-GPU integration but also demonstrated an unprecedented control over a product. The compact circuitry has enabled small form factor giving iPad a maximum battery life of 10 hours. These achievements of Apple should offset the criticism by some designers that not much should be read in A4 because essentially A4 is just a single-core, low-power, low-performance CPU and cannot suffice for running servers or complicated games. Apple has proved that it can take care of its design needs and no more depends upon others. If in the future it wants more powerful processors for its products, it can work out its way all alone.

Strategic shift
Is there a strategic shift in semicon design? Take two scenarios. First, Apple seems to prove that with great advances in EDA tools, design is no more as esoteric as before, and gradually more and more OEMs with huge volume production, such as HP and Dell, could strategically make their own chips. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that nothing is going to remain highly specialized forever in the hands of a few, but gradually “democratize” itself and reach many? Apple has started this process of democratization, which I believe will go on, creating new paradigms for semicon consumers and new challenges for semicon suppliers. Second, with design costs rising exponentially, companies like Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, and others have shed hundreds of chip designers and moved to commodity chips. Even a leading IDM such as AMD is splitting off manufacturing of ICs. Vertical integration has long been given up as an economically viable idea.

Which scenario will prevail? Democracy has its own strengths in the long run and Apple has opened fresh possibilities.