Richard Cownie (tich@pobox.com) on 9/30/09 wrote:
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>hobold (hobold@vectorizer.org) on 9/30/09 wrote:
>---------------------------
>
>>But Apple has the PWRficient team on their payroll now.
>
>Yeah, I don't know what that's about. But with their
>first-gen chips taking 5W+, it doesn't seem like a good
>fit for battery-powered devices. It always seems easier
>to grow an architecture upwards to bigger faster
>implementations than to shrink downwards - you're never
>going to see an Itanium (or a Vax) embedded in your toaster,
>but you might get to see an ARM in your netbook.
>
>Also the PWRficient chips are 64bit. Seems to me it would
>be better suited to building efficient server farms -
>64bit architecture makes it easier to support a decent
>amount of DRAM, Linux (or OSX) should run fine, cores at
>2GHz+ should be not too much slower than x86, and power
>seems substantially lower. Though trying to compete against
>x86 in anything really computer-like has not been a good
>strategy the past 15 years ...
>
I believe Apple stated that they acquired the design team, and the existing designs merely came with that. Public opinion was that Apple would pursue new chip designs.

Is it even legally possible to roll your own ARM ISA compatible chip? Does ARM, the company, grant such licenses?