Apple gobbles up chip maker Intrinsity for $121 million

Apple's buying spree for chip technology companies continues, with The New York Times reporting that the company has acquired Intrinsity. The Texas-based fabless semiconductor company was widely thought to be the engineering brains behind the iPad's A4 system-on-a-chip. Intrinsity's 1 GHz hummingbird processor was developed in partnership with Samsung last year, and the A4 is believed to be based on that technology.

The terms of the agreement have not yet been made public, but analysts have reported a price tag of US$121 million. Apple-watchers expected this deal to be closed this month after many Intrinsity employees changed their pages on LinkedIn to show their new job titles at Apple.

Intrinsity's acquisition by Apple continues the trend of the Cupertino-based electronics manufacturer bringing more chip expertise in-house, with the 2008 purchase of P.A. Semi being the most widely-publicized example. Some of Intrinsity's former customers include Samsung, ATI, LSI Corporation, and AMCC.

[via Mashable]

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html

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Apple's buying spree for chip technology companies continues, with The New York Times reporting that the company has acquired Intrinsity....

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Thomas

I wonder how many of the Intrinsity employees will be unemployed after the takeover? Sure, the engineers will go to work for Apple, but the rest will likely be out the door.

April 28 2010 at 7:31 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Matt

Great Scott!

April 27 2010 at 11:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

timrowledge

Apple would need their own X86 license before they could actually design and manufacture replacement chips for Intel.
I suspect the suggestion was that Apple might move to ARM architecture chips, for which they already have an architecture license and plenty of experience.
Considering that you could run quite a few high performance ARM cores for the same power usage as a single whatever-the-hell-x86, this might be a quite interesting route forward. How about a couple of dozen 1GHz ARM cores in your laptop? The hardware is not hard, it's the system software - there just hasn't been much real-world use of more a than a pair or quad of cpus in a single machine. (Yes, I know about Crays and SGI monster machines etc. How many people have useful experience in programming them?) Such a pity the old Transputer lost out to x86 all those years ago. Imagine where we might be with 128/256/more cpu machines now?

April 27 2010 at 9:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dave

So, I don't know the answer to this: do you think that Apple would ever supersede Intel and put Apple-made chips on their Macs?

If I understand correctly, that would necessitate a change-over like from Power PC to Intel, so pretty stupid?

April 27 2010 at 7:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

4 replies to Dave's comment

Kyle Kinkade

Million.

April 27 2010 at 6:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

hmurchison

Intrinsity..founded by the old skool Exponential guys.

April 27 2010 at 6:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply