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<\/a>A New York Times report<\/a> on Apple’s A4 chip, a custom-designed piece of silicon that powers the company’s new iPad tablet displays, is surprisingly negative on whether Apple gets any benefit from designing custom chips to go with its custom software.<\/p>\nHere’s a boil-down of the negatives from the article:<\/p>\n
\nThe do-it-yourself approach gives Apple the chance to build faster, more battery-friendly products than rivals and helps the company to keep product development secret.<\/p>\n
But designing its own processors burdens Apple with additional engineering costs and potential product delays. It also forces the company to hire \u2014 and retain \u2014 experienced chip designers. Several who joined the company in 2008 after an acquisition have already left for a secretive start-up.<\/p>\n
Though chip industry experts have yet to put the iPad through their customary rigorous tests, Apple\u2019s demonstrations left them underwhelmed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t see anything that looks that compelling,\u201d said Linley Gwennap, a chip analyst at the Linley Group. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem like something all that new, and, if it is, they are not getting far with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom what we have seen so far, Apple\u2019s product seems to stack up evenly with the competition,\u201d said Dean McCarron, a chip analyst with Mercury Research. \u201cClearly, Apple is using their own metric for whatever \u2018best\u2019 is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Blogger Louis Gray, who follows Apple closely, thinks it’s a given that Apple’s products perform better<\/a> because of the commingling of hardware and software within the company. The A4 is just a start. Apple is openly hiring chip engineers — in part to replace several who left to join mysterious startup Agnilux<\/a>, but also, Gray says, to grow a larger team who design custom chips for more and more of Apple’s products going forward.<\/p>\n
“There are two giant sucking sounds in the Valley chip design space right now,” Gray claims a chip industry insider told him. “Apple is one of them, and NVIDIA is the other.”<\/p>\n
You know what this story needs? An engineer who can explain, in lay English, exactly how the A4 boosts the iPad’s performance over the available CPUs from Intel, Motorola, or whoever. If you’re that engineer, email me at paul@venturebeat.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n