The A6 chip powering Apple’s iPhone 5 is said to be completely designed in-house and puts Cupertino in competition with leading chip developing companies. With Apple announcing the production of its own mobile processors with the launch of Apple iPad in 2010, it was clear that Apple didn’t made all those chip related acquisitions to just research. As competition in the mobile market heats up, Apple is looking to get as independent as possible on every front. Be it manufacturing its components or designing them.
Apparently Apple has hired Jim Mergard who spent 16 years with AMD and then served as the chief engineer at Samsung. Given the rivalry between Apple and Samsung, this news gets a bit more glare from the public and media. Samsung has been a key supplier of displays, processors, memory and other components for building its mobile products. However as mobile market battle between the two companies escalates to cour rooms, the relationship for sourcing components has also gone sour. Apple is known to be decreasing its reliance on Samsung for almost everything. Be it investing in display plants with Sharp or moving to other players for manufacturing its chips.
Apple certainly can’t back down from building its own chips anymore and needs to keep up the R&D to ensure future generations of iPhone, iPad and other product lines relying on ARM based processors is secured with good horsepower. At the same time, as convergence happens between mobile and desktop systems, Apple would someday need to make a call to unify or integrate its Mac and iOS platforms. Windows is doing that by supporting both Intel and ARM on Windows 8 and what route Apple chooses is yet to be seen. Apple might well switch Mac OS to ARM if technology permits, but we can’t rule out something completely different either. For now, Microsoft has taken a bold bet and all eyes are on Apple for their move.