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More Details on Apple's New Orlando 'GPU Design Center'

Friday May 31, 2013 11:03 am PDT by Jordan Golson
We've learned more details about Apple's new 'GPU Design Center' in Orlando, Florida, following our reporting from earlier this week.

Sources told MacRumors that the engineers Apple hired recently were not laid off from AMD, but were instead actively recruited -- largely via their LinkedIn profiles. Apple is said to have learned that many of AMD's 3D graphics patents were issued from its Orlando offices and targeted this area specifically. AMD has job listings for its Orlando offices to fill several of these recently vacated positions.

The temporary office space that Apple has leased for the new team in Orlando is located very close to AMD's campus in the city, though Apple is reportedly building permanent offices as well. Apple hired more than twenty employees from AMD and recruited more than that, with Apple reportedly looking to build the GPU team up to roughly forty engineers.

The newly hired employees are said to be reporting to the Austin-based former Intrinsity team that Apple acquired two years ago. Intrinsity technology was used in the A4 processor, and their expertise has contributed to Apple's more recent chips as well.

With its hiring of these 3D graphics specialists, Apple is likely working to redevelop its 3D graphics capabilities in its iOS devices. The company has made a number of acquisitions in recent years to revamp its chip design capabilities, and this new team would seem to supplement those efforts.
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Benjamins
69 months ago
Apple TV is turning into a game console.
Rating: 8 Votes
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holmesf
69 months ago

ARM is intently competitive. Both reference design chips and custom chips.
Thats why we have had such an insane speed growth in ARM since Iphone. It was an 416mhz ARM.

Today we have 4+4 cores/4 cores ARM 15 at 2 to 3 ghz. Upwards 20 times faster in 7 years.

Compare that with X86 since 2006. Less then 200% speed increase till 2013.


You are mistaken to think that ARM's improvement shows that it is competitive vs Intel or AMD.

The reason why ARM performance has increased so quickly is the same reason why CPU performance improved so quickly during the 90s and early 2000s: because they were able to take advantage of pipelining, superscalar, out of order, and speculative execution. ARM couldn't take advantage of those things until recent years because of power and size requirements of the chips. Intel and AMD already had these things implemented in their x86 chips, so it's been much harder to improve single threaded performance. ARM will soon face this same problem once it implements all the "low hanging fruit" chip features.

When it comes to competing in the high performance market, the advantage of the ARM architecture declines dramatically. The debate over what instruction set architecture is best should be left in the last decade. Instruction sets don't matter much anymore. The future is about who implements heterogeneous computing the best.
Rating: 3 Votes
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holmesf
69 months ago
I'm somewhat nervous about Apple developing its own GPU technology (if that's indeed what this means). We've seen thus far that Apple's move to develop its own CPU technology (Apple armv7s swift core versus licensing ARM Cortex A15) has served it well in the iPad 4 and iPhone 5, but licensing PowerVR intellectual property from Imgtech has always kept Apple on the forefront of mobile graphics. Every generation of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has licensed the GPU technology from Imgtech and they've always, always had the fastest GPUs of any given generation. And Imgtech's roadmap seems pretty Apple friendly: OpenGL ES 3.0 support and OpenCL support, the two huge graphics technologies that Apple is backing.

So I wonder what spurs this move for Apple to create its own GPU design center. What are they looking for that Imgtech has not provided them? What are they going to use these resources to do?
Rating: 2 Votes
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kockgunner
69 months ago
I'm excited for all these in-house designs. Partly because of the cool factor of having something exclusive like the PPC days (immature right?) but mostly because it gives is more competition and surprise.

Currently when Intel announces something we can be pretty sure what we are going to be using in our laptops for the next 4 years. But if Apple is really pushing this area we may be seeing some crazy fast chips that are unheard of and provide even more performance.
Rating: 2 Votes
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Millah
69 months ago

They should move to Melbourne where authentec is. Much cheaper and less traffic.


As someone who lives near Authentec in Melbourne, I would love to have a bigger "Apple design center" here :D




Australia is quite expensive nowadays due to the exchange rate.


He's talking about Melbourne, FL silly. Its an hour away from Orlando.
Rating: 2 Votes
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chrmjenkins
69 months ago

ARM is intently competitive. Both reference design chips and custom chips.
Thats why we have had such an insane speed growth in ARM since Iphone. It was an 416mhz ARM.

Today we have 4+4 cores/4 cores ARM 15 at 2 to 3 ghz. Upwards 20 times faster in 7 years.

Compare that with X86 since 2006. Less then 200% speed increase till 2013.

Its incredible that Apple choose to compete in this market when there are so many vendors to pit against each other. But this is Apples unique position: they control both hardware and software. This gives Apple the ability to put custom DSP and stuff into their SoC's just for their OS.

The A5 SoC had 30% die area with Apple specific stuff. Like the "Apple visual processor (in real world NOVA SIMD), noise cancellation DSPs for Siri, Dual channel RAM and so on.

Apple will continue with their custom SoCs. One thing that is real interesting is Anobit and their/Apples SSD controllers. We will move to fast NAND FLASH chips in iPad/iPhone. Imagine having 550 megs/sec bandwidth. Its possible with lightning to thunderbolt connector or gigabit WiFi.

Remember that Apple's goal is to replace Intel with their own SoC. Todays AIRs/Macbook pros the Intel CPU/Motherboard is 50% of BOM. Apple and the consumers could save huge by dumping X86. A 1970 technology.


I think you're over-romanticizing the rise of ARM and exaggerating x86's faults. ARM's rise owes a lot to all the money pouring into it. More money means more engineering and it also means higher demands. TDPs have also been going up, based solely on the principle that your processor is on less and your average usage is still constant.

Meanwhile, x86, an already mature technology, has always had the high performance requirements in a relatively static TDP. It's also been converted into a mobile platform that can finally compete with ARM on a performance/watt basis.

Well one thing for sure people expecting to see the fruits of these hires in the next few months are way off base.


Yes, it took several years for Intrinsity and PA Semi to crank out Swift. Expect the same time-frame for a custom GPU implementation.
Rating: 2 Votes
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chrmjenkins
69 months ago

Have you actually read what is all part of what you call "XBox division"? One part of that division happens to be the Macintosh software unit. So every time someone buys Microsoft Office for the Mac, it adds profit to the so-called "XBox division".


Macintosh software is a part of their entertainment and devices division? News to me.
Rating: 2 Votes
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Renzatic
69 months ago

Gaming PCs are 10-20 times more powerful than an xbox360... yet, xboxes are selling well, and PCs aren't. This suggests that more power isn't necessary for huge sales. In previous console generations, people were still buying more powerful PCs. That's the big difference, this generation.


PC sales have taken a big hit this year, but that doesn't mean they're selling poorly all around. OEMs still pushed close to 100,000,000 out the doors, even while taking a 15% drop overall.

While it's no longer a sure thing, the death of the PC is very much fiction.
Rating: 1 Votes
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MACchine
69 months ago
Connect the IP ...

Funny, I have spent time driving all over Orlando, I NEVER noticed bad drivers, I guess that is because I am from California where they give licenses to illiterate illegals who stop every chance they get because they are scared, can't read the signs, and are driving a car for the first times in their lives. I DID like the many empty side streets in Florida, but the tolls were quite annoying, and lots of roads to nowhere!

Everyone commenting here is failing to connect the IP dots:(

APPLE has a patent for multilayered displays to create 3D displays, certainly this group will be creating GPU to for these displays and experimenting with creating software to render 3D from 2D imaging, or they will build 3D cameras and GPU;)

I wonder if the flattening of the interface and icons might be because they will soon ship some kind of layered 3D display that will show icons as CUBES and they need simple graphics to conserve processing power:eek:

This would mean the much publicised schism between Ive and Forestal was ALL THEATER in lieu of this new techs roll out;)

Now let me tell you about the OLD FOGEY drivers in Cali. who shake their fist at you if you ride a bike staying in the bike lane, they get all freaked out because they don't notice the bike lanes and would not have the FOGGIEST as to how they work even if they did notice them:rolleyes:
Rating: 1 Votes
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agmaster
69 months ago

Speaking of traffic I hope Apple insures these guys well. Florida has possibly the worst drivers in the country, very inconsiderate. I spent a week down there for vacation a couple of years ago. For one week I saw way to many major car crashes - very disturbing. Maybe I was unlucky but I lost several hours over the course of the week waiting for wrecks to be cleared, pretty nasty looking wrecks too.


Yeah, the I-4 / Orlando area is full of ***hole drivers that are more likely to cause accidents than any other part of the state of FL. My proof, I live 45 min away.

Anyways, how awesome would it be if Apple decided to make its own mobile graphics chip for laptops that could rival the latest stuff from AMD & Nvidia. If only the Mac-side of Apple were more important to them than iOS stuff...
Rating: 1 Votes

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