Apple has for long been making chips for its iPhones. Last year, the company reported that the A13X Bionic processor was faster than the 95% chips found in PCs. It is true that Apple has reached “god-level” with its chips and the company is rumoured to ditch Intel in the future to use its own chips on the Mac computers.
With great emphasis on the silicon powering the Apple computers, the company now has a chip design team in Bengaluru, the tech city of India. It’s part of the $1 billion acquisition of Intel’s smartphone modem business earlier this year. According to Times of India, upto 160 Intel engineers are to join the new “chip design” team.
ARM-based chips are getting faster
It’s unclear as to how much the Bengaluru team will contribute to the blueprint of the A-series chips that power the iPhone. With multiple reports suggesting that Apple is soon to release its ARM based chips on the Mac platform, the company could be further strengthening its foundation by increasing the number of people working on it.
The Intel acquisition will bring about 2,200 new members aboard the Apple team; not all of them will join the “chip design” team though. Another interesting point to note is that, the recent move is not the first time Apple has invested in chip designing in Bengaluru but the company has already hired around 80 engineers from major companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia.
According to Prakash Sangham, founder of a US-based research firm named Tantra Analyst, the Bengaluru team will help Apple speed-up the transition to Intel based 4G/3G modems. Apple has had multiple legal battles with Qualcomm, the company that supplies most of the modems that power the iPhones, and it has been looking for ways to move away from using Qualcomm modems.
