Funny because Walmart sell iPhones now.
I think they did pretty well out of it. Given Freescale's prices and the cost of PowerBooks, against the cost of the actual production of the chip..

IBM made even more of a profit I'd guess, since the G3 (750FX/GX) actually cost more than the G4 (7447A) at the time.

The one thing I am looking at here is the SGTL5000 audio chip; very nice. I didn't think Freescale did this stuff anymore..

What this looks like is that Apple may be producing a 7" tablet iPod - this is the rumour anyway. Using the i.MX51 is probably their best solution since I doubt you will find an ARM Cortex core with the same kind of features (the [CENSORED SECRET NDA] which just makes it all the more awesome). Rather than use a Marvell XScale or some PortalPlayer chip, the options basically are only between TI OMAP and i.MX51 for today's top end ARM cores for embedded devices of this class.

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Matt Sealey

Okay, at this point, Apple is on the shot? ;-)
Common customers, maybe. Surly not Apple.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =164302219

Also IBM. I think it was a SEC Filing back in 2002. There were stated they (Apple) bought the top end 970 (2GHz) for 50$.

Steve was (and is) the: "three dicks and the rockettes, for free" man ^^

That sounds like decent volume pricing, but do you remember the price they got for the CPC945 northbridge?

It's possible to get decent PowerPC chips for under $65 right now (especially if you deal in large volumes). Building units like a EeePC or EeeTop is possible because the pricing is similar to the Atom (although Atom pricing is about ~$55 in low volumes, it includes the 945GC northbridge for "free". This is why the $80 Atom motherboard is possible - huge discounts on the two biggest chips on the board if you buy in huge volumes).

Remember that at the end of the day every ~90nm PowerPC chip on the market about the complexity of the MPC86xx series, the 130nm G4s, or IBM's older G3s, costs about $25 to actually *make* on a 30cm wafer. IBM made a profit, unless they blew it all on other development or solving yield problems or something.

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Matt Sealey

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8595694202.htm

Looks like ARM is the way to go.

Oh well, I guess we give up and go home then?

There will be plenty of these i.MX51 netbooks around with Ubuntu on them so why bother if Genesi cannot differentiate ourselves or produce in such high volumes?

Get real :D

There is no "way to go". You can put anything in a Netbook and as long as it does what you need, it is good. Apple chose ARM but the important thing is they ported MacOS X to the iPhone rather than some weird special OS. This is what enables their technology, the OS and iTunes and Safari.

There is still a place for PowerPC here, given the following benefits

* Similar if not better power consumption on the MPC8610 which can still provide a 6 hour battery life on a Netbook; if Atom can get there, then the MPC8610 can
* AltiVec still gives some advantages
* At 1GHz the MPC8610 will also outperform the i.MX at most prudent tasks (and give the average low-end Atom a run for it's money too)
* Much higher integration than Atom
* Available RIGHT NOW (just like the Atom) and not in 9 months.

We could have an MPC8610 Netbook motherboard design done in a couple of months and be shipping soon after with full production silicon and no delays.

What we're looking at though is the possibility that i.MX graphics will completely outclass the MPC8610 internal DIU (as even Intel's GMA950 does, although it barely accelerates 2D and 3D)

.. but do you really need high end 3D on a netbook? For checking email and browsing the web?

The iPhone sure doesn't.

It depends what you are going for, really. All the ARM angle proves is that you don't need it to be an x86 processor.

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Matt Sealey

Karl:
Do you think Apple or anyone in this business
are doing charity? They are here to maximize
their profits and make a living on it. Of course
you'd expect your long-time customers to try and
make good deals.

We do it almost every day in our company..

If IBM or Freescale would make a loss at Apple,
it's their own fault. Noone forced them into
selling chips at a loss..

When our prospective customers tries to get
our services or products too cheap, we simply
back down. No customer is worth making a loss
on.. Noone.

Right you are. IBM doesn't do charity aswell.
Maybe that's the reason why IBM skipped "Apple" development and went to Sony/M$? ;)

FreeScale e.g. made only 5% of revenue with Apple as customer.

You don't think Apple will use the PWRficient?
From my perspective it's the easier/better way ...

I think the PowerPC is a closed chapter for Apple.

No, Jobs ;-)

PowerPC is evil ^^

Where did you get that figure?

Regardless of total revenue for Freescale as a company, the unit that does (did) the G4 and other related products took in 75% of it's revenue from Apple and only 25% from other customers.

That's a big deal to lose that proportion of revenue from any business unit.

Freescale makes a lot of money on the smaller things; automotive chipsets, sensors, flash memory, cellular (including i.MX), power management and of course the usual 8 and 16-bit microcontrollers like Coldfire, Starcore DSPs, and the like, and always will make more money on that (since you could put a Freescale sensor in just about anything, and in fact, they do..)

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Matt Sealey

Does it really matter?

http://osdir.com/ml/org.user-groups.slu ... 00027.html

Yes :D
Indeed.. you got your number wrong :D

The point is that 3% of total revenue is still revenue. And if we assume that total is $50 million in the PowerBook, iBook and Mac Mini at the time, is nothing to sniff at (if they really got chips for $50, that's one million units, I somehow think they were getting them somewhat cheaper)

Remember the timing of the Intel switch too. Notebooks only started to outsell desktops in 2005 (at least in terms of total sales, it hit 53% in May 2005 which was the first time ever..) and this coincides almost exactly with a downturn in PowerBook sales - people were waiting for Intel.

So, you can't just look at the numbers and say "well any money from PowerPC notebooks would be a piss in the ocean for Freescale" - it might be, but 1) no business manager would turn his nose up at $50 million in revenue and 2) as long as our partners do not announce a 3-year venture to move to a competing processor line, we'll be fine.

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Matt Sealey

Asus Eee Keyboard

For all you fans of the A1200..

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Matt Sealey

the keyboard would be nice if it had arm or powerpc and something other than the winblows key (OS key ?)