Rob Thorpe (rthorpe@robertthorpeconsulting.com) on 1/19/11 wrote:
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>A lot of other folks seem to have done most of my job for me, but I think there are still a few more points to clear up.
>
>Brett (ggtgp@yahoo.com) on 1/18/11 wrote:
>---------------------------
>...
>>I never claimed that Apple was a CPU design company.
>>Building a SOC (System On Chip) complete with Apple designed ADB and Apple designed
>>FireWire and Apple designed IWM is not a trivial task.
>
>Well, Aaron Spink thinks otherwise. Since he AFAIK he designs chips I'm believing him not you.
>
>>My claim was "Apple has a long history of using SOC to drive cost down and volumes up."
>>And then I gave URLs to prove what I had said.
>>The resultant commentary is little more than Apple bashing.
>
>The rest of us agree with you that Apple have collected together logic into single
>chips. We don't agree that this constitutes serious "chip design talent". It's
>also not very unique, other companies have done the same thing and much more.
>
>Most of the things you mention could be done by a handful of people and may well have been done by outside contractors.

The funny part is that I agree with you.
Apple has "enough" "chip design talent" to do what it needs to do for new breakthroughs in industrial design for revolutionary new consumer appliances.
(WARNING: My phraseology is designed to annoy computer geeks. ;)
As for being "serious" in "chip design talent", who cares, I dont.

Apple has people like Aaron Spink, he has probably worked on an Apple product or two.

>Do you have any evidence that HP have done better than Dell because of SOC? What
>SOC have HP used in the past few years that has allowed them to get ahead of Dell?

My experience with HP is dated, (PA RISC era) since then HP has bought several huge companies and gone through many layoffs.

Once upon a time ago there was a company called Apollo Computer that was the second largest workstation company behind Sun. HP bought them.
(Lots of people here still use Mentor Graphics products.)

The Apollo hardware engineers were hard pressed to engineer their way out of a wet paper bag.
(The software engineers were not much better, Aegis sucked compared to UNIX.)

The workstation motherboards were 11 layers and covered in engineering change wires. Huge boards covered tightly in small dual inline packages.
(The CPU was a 68020, nothing special.)

HP replaces huge iron PC box with smaller box with 6-ish layer motherboard covered lightly (not tightly) with square custom chips. No engineering change wires.

Later we got pizza boxes with HP PA-RISC CPUs.

HP clearly understood industrial design and making new form factor products that would sell.

> Lots of stuff on OEMs and ODMs, etc, that I have no disagreement with.

Dell is re-active, a big customer asks for something, or a competitor has something, and Dell asks its supply chain for a copy.
Or something new from the supply chain shows up on the dock, so Dell sells it.
Dell has salesmen.

HP has engineers, engineers want to make things BETTER.