Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Month: February 2010

  • AppleInsider | Custom Apple A4 iPad chip estimated to be $1 billion investment

    In bypassing a traditional chip maker like Intel and creating its own custom ARM-based processor for the iPad, Apple has likely incurred an investment of about $1 billion, a new report suggests.

    via AppleInsider | Custom Apple A4 iPad chip estimated to be $1 billion investment.

    After reading the NYTimes article linked to within this article I can only conclude it’s a very generalized statement that it costs $1Billion to create a custom chip. The exact quote from the NYTimes article author Ashlee Vance is: “Even without the direct investment of a factory, it can cost these companies about $1 billion to create a smartphone chip from scratch.”

    Given that is one third the full price of building a  chip fabrication plant, why so expensive? What is the breakdown of those costs. Apple did invest money in PA Semiconductor to get some chip building expertise (they primarily designed chips that were fabricated at overseas contract manufacturing plants). Given Qualcomm has created the Snapdragon CPU using similar cpu cores from ARM Holdings Inc., they must have $1Billion to throw around too? Qualcomm was once dominant in the cell phone market licensing its CDMA technology to the likes of Verizon. But it’s financial success is nothing like the old days. So how does Qualcomm come up with $1Billion to develop the Snapdragon CPU for smartphones? Does that seem possible?

    Qualcomm and Apple are licensing the biggest building blocks and core intellectual property from ARM, all they need to do is route and place and verify the design. Where does the $1Billion figure come into it? Is it the engineers? Is it the masks for exposing the silicon wafers? I argue now as I did in my first posting about the Apple A4 chip, the chip is an adaptation of intellectual property, a license to a CPU design provided by ARM. It’s not literally created from ‘scratch’ starting with no base design or using completely new proprietary intellectual property from Apple. This is why I am confused. Maybe ‘from scratch’ means different things to different people.

  • Next Flash Version Will Support Private Browsing

    Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Next Flash Version Will Support Private Browsing.

    I’m beginning to think Adobe should just make Flash into a web browser that plays back it’s own movie format. That will end all debates over open standards and so forth and provide better support/integration. There is nothing wrong with a fragmented browser market. It’s what we already have right now.

    If you have ever heard from someone that Adobe Flash is buggy and crashes a lot and have to trust their judgment, then please do. It’s not the worst thing ever invented, but it certainly could be better. Given Adobe’s monopoly on web delivered video (ie YouTube) one would think they could maintain competitive advantage through creating a better user experience (like Apple entering the smart phone market). But instead they have attempted to innovate as a way of maintaining their competitiveness and so Flash has bloated up to accommodate all kinds of ActionScript and interactivity that used to only exist in desktop applications. So why should Adobe settle for just being a tool maker and browser plug-in? I say show everyone what the web browser should be, and compete.

  • Google Chrome bookmark sync

    I used to do this with a plug-in called Google Browser Sync on Mozilla back in the day. Since then, there’s a Firefox plug-in for Delicious that would help keep things synced up with that bookmark sharing site. But that’s not really what I wanted. I wanted Google Browser Sync, and now I finally have it again, cross platform.

    At long last Mac and PC versions of the Google Chrome web browser have the ability to save bookmarks to Google Docs and sync all the changes/additions/deletions to that single central file. I’m so happy I went through and did a huge house cleaning on all my accumulated bookmarks. Soon I will follow-up to find out which ones are dead and get everything ship-shape once again. It’s sad the utility of a program like browser sync is taken away. I assume it was based on arbitrary measures of popularity and success. Google’s stepping down and taking away Browser Sync gave some developers a competitive edge for a while, but I wanted Browser Sync no matter who it was that did the final software development. And now finally I think I have it again.

    Why is bookmark syncing useful? The time I’ve spent finding good sources of info on the web can be wasted if all I ever do is Google searches. The worst part is every Google search is an opportunity for Google to serve me AdWords related to my search terms. What I really want is the website that has a particularly interesting article or photo gallery. Keeping bookmarks direct to those websites bypasses Google as the middleman. Better yet, I have a link I can share with friends who need to find a well vetted, curated source of info. This is how it should be and luckily now with Chrome, I have it.

  • links for 2010-02-04