Apple iPhone 5S Ping!
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Posted on 09/11/2013 12:08:32 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Link is to wrong article.
How’s the battery life?
Did not find any thing up on Anandtech as yet ...
Ping!
I wasn’t aware Apple has a wafer fab. Learn something new every day....
Apple owns a fabless design company. . . they designed it. But Apple is reported to have purchased United Microelectronics Corporation, a chip fabrication company this summer, capable of producing the A7 processor in house.
The vast majority of companies designing and selling chips don’t own their own fab. TSMC in Taiwan, GloFo in the US, Singapore, and Germany, Samsung in the USA, and to a lesser extent IBM are where the chips are made, for a fee.
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Makes sense. It was once the dream of a corporate VP at Motorola to become “fabless.” I think that has a lot to do with why there is no Motorola (as we knew her) anymore. Full disclosure: I worked for them at the time they hatched this brilliant strategy.
Yes, the trend is towards wafer “foundries.” Good for production, but difficult for research.
It might be ok for some companies, but for Motorola it was a classic case of hollowing out. Much the same thing happened to Sun--they offshored most of their manufacturing to design houses, gained short-term profits, and then hollowed out the company because the top physical product designers eventually lost touch with the latest techniques.
It’s a natural consequence of moving management of a tech company from engineers to accountants. Almost killed the big three car companies, too. If you’re a bank, OK, but taking engineering out of the VP-level management is fatal for a tech company.
Couldn’t agree more. There’s more to management than the NPV on a spreadsheet, especially with naive assumptions about continuing market position and rates of return. It’s the difference between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He may have been a hell of a COO, but he isn’t a visionary.
Personally I'm hoping that Microsoft lures Gates back into the CEO position. Or failing that, places a CEO who is accountable to Gates as chief visionary.
For all the nasty things people have said about Gates (and I've said my share), it was a huge loss to Microsoft's position as a market leader when he stepped away from control of the company. Ballmer's tenure as CEO has been, on balance, a disaster for the company even though there were some monetary benefits. Ballmer was, and remains, totally f'n clueless.
I believe Bill Gates' return to Microsoft would be not unlike Steve Jobs' return to Apple -- it would serve to revitalize the product line, inspire the employees, all of those good things.
Ruthless... but clueless. Yup.
They don’t. Almost no one does any more. The capital investment necessary to set up a fab line is immense, and there’s enough fab capacity out there that there’s no point in trying to set one up.
Even a company as large as cisco doesn’t fab their own chips. They design, simulate, etc and then they send the design out to a fab house. In one case, we were looking at using IBM’s fab for a SOAC router chip.
You’re right, and it is the consequence of having technology-ignorant management that does the outsourcing.
First, they don’t like the CapEx that goes with equipment, labs, etc.
So they outsource the manufacturing.
Then they don’t like the salaries they’re paying engineers. So they ship the engineering functions off-shore, thinking that Indians and Chinese are “just as smart” (they’re not - I’ve interviewed dozens of both. what they have are credentials, not smarts).
Then the intellectual property goes out the back door in India and China.
Then their products get duplicated at one-fifth the cost and one-tenth the quality. The “free traders” consider this a victory, because people who believe in “free trade” are just as stupid as (or are) management types with liberal arts degrees who don’t know their ass from a hot rock in “making things.”
Then.. the company starts strip-mining their balance sheet, and eventually, they’re an acquisition target for the last of their IP, or they go belly up.
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