The perils for Apple in creating its own chip team
The consensus is building that Apple is designing its own chips in an effort to create exclusive features for the gadgets that it plans to sell in the future.
If the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can pull it off, that would be great. But in this day and age, it’s kind of a crazy strategy and one that is fraught with risks. Apple could clearly benefit by not having to pay for chips designed by others. But that privilege comes with hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering costs.
Some of the evidence is obvious, which we noted as far back as September. Apple of course made a lot of waves a year ago when it bought PA Semi, a team headed by microprocessor architecture veterans Dan Dobberpuhl and Jim Keller, who were the brains behind the Digital Equipment Corp. StrongArm low-power microprocessor. And Apple invested in a graphics chip company last year.
