Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

By creating its own custom ARM (News - Alert)-based processor for the iPad, instead of using chips from somebody like, oh, Intel, Apple 'has likely incurred an investment of about $1 billion,' a new report suggests.

As Wired.com remarked, 'That makes Apple’s (News - Alert) $278 million acquisition of semiconductor manufacturer PA Semi look like pocket change.'

'Profiling the rise of competitors to Intel (News - Alert), The New York Times noted the costly investments technology companies have made to create advanced mobile processors for smartphones,' AppleInsider writes. 'But in the race to build smaller and more efficient chips for mobile devices, overseas foundries have proven to be formidable rivals against Intel,' the industry leader.

Last month Britain's RegHardware noted that 'the big question is perhaps not whether Apple will announce the eagerly anticipated iPad next week, but what chip will power the media tablet. Since the device is expected to run a version of the iPhone (News - Alert) operating system, and given that battery life is likely to be a key factor in the iPad's success, it's hard to imagine Apple using anything other than an ARM-based processor in there.'

'Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm are designing their own takes on ARM-based mobile chips that will be made by the contract foundries,' the report said. 'Even without the direct investment of a factory, it can cost these companies about $1 billion to create a smartphone chip from scratch.'

As RegHardware said, remember that 'back in 2008, Apple acquired chip designer PA Semi, and that CEO Steve Jobs (News - Alert) subsequently said that Apple's new semiconductor engineers would be working on SoCs for the iPhone and iPod -- tacit confirmation that the team would be working with ARM cores.'

Intel is pushing its low-power, low-cost Atom processor for mobile devices, including smartphones, but the chips still cost more and use more power than their ARM competitors, AppleInsider says: 'The forthcoming iPad includes a 1GHz Apple A4 processor, based on the ARM architecture, which includes an integrated CPU and graphics processing. Based on the Cortex-A9 MPCore, the processor is much faster than the ARM-based CPU that powers the iPhone 3GS.'