It's even more efficient when you just relabel a standard chip you bought from Samsung and just tell everyone that you've put lots of effort into designing it. Works much better than I'd have imagined anyway.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
Meh, ARM is a space where a number of companies are already in cutthroat competition and no one is going to walk in and totally change the game.
Apple's MO here is pretty clear:
(1) investigate their options thoroughly,
(2) back the best price/performance,
(3) possibly make some optimizations,
(4) then lock up the supply if possible.
...
And the results actually are pretty impressive, iPad 2 leaves every other tablet in the dust:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4605/40363.png
While getting the best battery life in the category:
44 fps / 1.30 = 33.8 fps, still ahead by anywhere from 45% to 200%.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie...
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
You realize this doesn't make sense...right?
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity. They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient. Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices. They also sell them to Apple. Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4. Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
So what am I missing?
It's customizing the design, not creating a custom design.