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I'm not surprised -- I used to read all of Hannibal's reviews -- but it is innovation on the chip maker's part. Apple and HP are doing little more than plugging it into a socket.

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Except Apple purchased PA Semiconductor and designed the A8 chip in-house. Samsung fabricates it.

You mean A4, not A8. Cortex A8 was not designed by PA.

Even A4 "designed by Apple" SoC contains many blocks from Samsung catalogue and PowerVR SGX GPU from Imagination Technologies. They built a lego set, they didn't start on green grass field.

All SoC design comes from a fabricator's toolkit. When you do VLSI Design or Verilog layout, you always feed the compiler a "technology file" which describes -- gasp -- building blocks of what is possible to synthesize from the builder's fab.

So yeah, apple didn't start out by implementing digital circuits with vacuum tubes. Thank you for that insightful comment.

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