Is Apple making an ARM-based System-On-Chip processor?

It is more than obvious that Apple follow the footsteps of Microsoft and create a line of Apple-branded chips. Just like Microsoft licensed the CPU technology from IBM [IBM Watermoose or Microsoft Xenon] and GPU technology from ATI [ATI R400 or Microsoft Xenos], creating XCPU and XGPU – Apple is planning to do the same with their own hardware.

Apple went the more direct route – the company acquired PA Semi and a number of executives from IBM, AMD and started hiring top programmers in the industry. We just looked at Apple’s job listing site and encountered an interesting position for currently fabless, non-silicon manufacturing company: a low-level programmer for ARM Coretex 10 architecture… given that we already saw Coretex architecture and its prefered placing [SoC designs], no wonder that Apple wants to explore that route as well. We’re not saying Apple is making SOC chip, but this hiring spree leaves little to be guessed – we all saw too many hirings that came to life, that being Intel Larrabee, nVidia Tegra or similar enterprises.

The programmers needed will belong to Vector & Numerics team, charged with “designing, enhancing and improving various subsystems running on iPhone OS”. Given the fact that this ARM-oriented programmer should have “additional Intel SSE or PowerPC AltiVec” knowledge… read between the lines, folks. Apple probably wants to take a piece of nVidia’s pie, given the recent success of Tegra and the alleged specifications of next-gen Tegra stuff.

You can view the job listing here – http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.showJob&RID=34691&CurrentPage=6

Original Author: Theo Valich

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