Given how anxious people are about the battery life on their mobile phones and how much more computing these devices are handling, one would think venture capital firms would rush to back Adapteva, which launched in May 2011. But Olofsson couldn’t find investors. He blames it on the reluctance of venture firms to back chip startups — and they certainly are leery of investing in capital-intensive hardware startups– but it could have been any number of reasons: bad business plan, a realization that handset makers weren’t going to swap out a Qualcomm application processor for an untried Adapteva option, or something else.

But instead of packing it in, Olofsson has turned to Kickstarter to bring his vision of supercomputer power in a tiny, low-power package to the market. He wants to sell a processor on a stripped-down board in two sizes as well as open source the software that will be needed to operate and program the chip. Called the Parallella project, the plan is to offer the 16-core board to those who pay $99 with the goal of raising $750,000. If the team can reach a stretch goal of $3 million it will also offer the 64-core version of its chip for $199.

Olofsson says he was inspired by the market and hobbyist community that’s building around Arduino boards and the Raspberry Pi, a low-power and low-cost computer. Earlier this month researchers at the University of Southampton made a supercomputer using LEGO bricks and Raspberry Pi modules. Olofsson acknowledged that project but pointed out that the Adapteva chip could deliver a lot more power — the 64-core version of his board delivers 51 gigahertz (compared to the 1.4 gigahertz processor inside the Samsung Galaxy 3) while consuming only five watts (that’s still a lot for a phone).

The Parallella boards will cost more however. Arduino boards or Raspberry Pi computers cost roughly $35 each as opposed to $99. But Oloffson is undaunted. He says researchers are already playing around with Adapteva chips for supercomputing and other projects, and aims to build a community. Kickstarter’s recent changes on how hardware companies will list their hardware caused minor launch snags for the Adapteva team, but nothing major.

In fact, the Kickstarter changes, which were designed to emphasize the funding nature of the platform instead of having people who backed products thinking of it more like a store, fit with Olofsson’s ideals. For him, bringing massively parallel computing to phones and other devices is a mission, not just a business.

“I feel like we have a better mousetrap here and yet the adoption has been very slow,” said Olofsson. ” And so we want to speed that up. As for the building a community, that’s our goal. We are talking a pretty scary step in opening our architecture. If this works we’re open sourcing and open licensing all of our SDKs. That’s the point of no return.”

Indeed. After raising a Series A of financing and taking on a convertible note to get to this point, Oloffson is betting his hopes on the Kickstarter community. There will be no Series B for Adapteva. In exchange for the community support, he’s stripped down his board and is opening up parts of his business that would be impossible for another chip company, where IP is everything. Make no mistake, this is a Hail Mary pass for his company, but it’s not one other chip startups could necessarily follow.

If Olofsson succeeds it may seem to be a new way of backing capital-intensive hardware firms, but in reality Adapteva spent $500,000 even getting the first version of its chips made. The military and its Series A strategic investor bore that cost, but declined to support the move beyond the $10,000 boards that are currently all Adapteva has to get people to embrace its new design. Let’s see if the Kickstarter community decides to give Adapteva and massively multicore parallel computing a whirl.

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Richard mainly compares the two companies to illustrate different approaches to chip making. Intel creates general-use chips that can be plugged into a wide range of devices and focuses on beefing up processing power exponentially. Apple, on the other hand, creates system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions that are tailor-made for specific uses; the A5 that powers the iPhone 4S and iPad is a perfect example.

Since Apple’s chips are designed specifically for a limited set of hardware, their development is streamlined, according to Richard, and includes perks like “longer battery life, instant on and a fast connection” that require “lower power” and therefore appear to outperform more-powerful processors from the likes of Intel, at least in consumer eyes.

Intel has plans to create SoC designs, however; its Haswell chip, planned for 2013, will embrace an approach more akin to Apple’s, designed for laptops and tablets. Intel is also a chip foundry, while Apple is not. That gives it more of a leg up when it comes to actually getting its chips made, since it isn’t subject to outside market forces like Apple’s legal problems with Samsung.

Even still, Intel may be more in competition with Apple than it might appear at first glance. Apple, of course, will in no way become a chip maker for outside companies and probably will never license its chip designs for use by competitors. But if it makes faster progress with creating hardware-specific SoC processors that provide the benefits listed above (low power consumption, faster boot and better battery life) while also allowing for the kind of performance consumers are looking for in a notebook, we could see Apple shift to in-house designs for future notebooks. It’s something the company is reported to have already actively tested, after all.

Intel is taking lots of steps to improve its mobile presence, including plans to integrate NFC capabilities into its chipsets. But Richard makes at least one good point with his comparison. Apple isn’t waiting around to see how things shake out, especially when it comes to mobile devices, and it has instead been at the forefront of a new mobile processing design charge.

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Broadcom’s move is an effort to use WiFi to tap into the “Internet of Things,” movement, where every device will one day be able to talk to each other, beyond just computers and cell phones — think everything from your car, to sensors throughout your home and office, to your electricity meter, and even down to tiny objects like the cap of your prescription pills, which could text you and tell you “hey, it’s time to take me now.”

However, not everyone thinks WiFi will be the dominate wireless networking technology that will provide the wireless layer for this Internet of things. Energy companies, smart meter makers and appliance makers are largely going with Zigbee, or even Z-Wave, because of low power needs. Though, no doubt WiFi will play a large role, particularly for devices in the home that will run over the home wireless connection.

A good portion of the Internet of things will involve energy-related products. Appliances, like dishwashers, microwaves, and water heaters, could use connections to be a lot more energy efficient, and connect with utilities to better manage the grid. Most homes in the U.S. will eventually get connected smart meters installed, acting as a two-way gateway for homes and utilities. Many of the appliance makers are waiting for standards to mature that will dictate what type of connectivity they need to embed in their goods.

Image is of GE’s connected fridge.

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Reports have been circulating that Apple has been in the process of trying to switch its chip-making business to Samsung rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in an effort to cut ties with the Korean smartphone and component manufacturer. TSMC, however, hasn’t been able to get the manufacturing process right, according to one of the Korea Times‘ sources, which means Apple had little choice but to go with Samsung.

Meanwhile, Samsung and Apple’s legal battles around the world have recently become more, not less divisive. Apple recently won several key victories in courts around the world, including an injunction secured in Australia against the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the successful prevention of a similar injunction against its own products in the Netherlands.

Statements made by Apple only indicate that things will get worse between the two companies before they get better. In court documents published Friday, Apple noted that it would only be interested in licensing its “lower level patents,” indicating that it wasn’t interested in a broad cross-licensing deal to end litigation. Samsung, too, has been talking tough about plans to beat Apple in appeals in areas where it has seen unfavorable rulings, according to another Korea Times article.

Legal battles notwithstanding, Samsung is reportedly already working on production of the Apple A6 chips in its manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas, according to the Korea Times’ sources. The chips are said to be quad-core, and will be used to power the next iPhone, according to the report. TSMC will continue to produce small volumes of custom chips for Apple, but it won’t be able to take over the bulk of Apple’s chip-making duties any time in the near future.

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Although Apple has confirmed the purchase with the New York Times, there’s still no official word on its plans for the company or the price paid. At least one estimate places the value of the deal at $121 million. The purchase comes on the heels of a rumor that Apple had approached ARM with an offer to purchase the major chip design licensing company.

Intrinsity isn’t completely out of the ballpark, though it is less of an industry powerhouse by a wide, wide margin. Still, it confirms that Apple is increasingly interested in the chip design side of the computing business, something which the in-house designed iPad A4 is also further proof of.

It’s also possible that we have another situation like that surrounding the Quattro Wireless acquisition on our hands. In that case, Quattro Wireless was clearly second choice to mobile advertising company AdMob, which Apple had apparently bid on before it was acquired by Google. ARM could’ve similarly spurned Apple’s advances, at which point it would’ve turned its attention to more receptive targets, including Intrinsity.

But what about Intrinsity makes it so appealing to Apple specifically? Well, the Texas chip maker in question may be relatively small, but in this case, fast thing comes in small sizes. Intrinsity is known for making very fast versions of mobile device chips. Not only that, but it may actually be the company responsible for the speedy A4 chip found in the iPad, if rumors are true.

The same division of Samsung that developed the A4 for Apple apparently worked with Intrinsity to find a way to ratchet up the speed of chips that normally run at 650 megahertz to a much snappier 1000 megahertz. If it’s true, Apple just secured its speed advantage over the competition for at least a little while, and it did so without putting much of a dent in its massive cash reserves.

The move may also be intended as a means to jump-start Apple’s stalled plans to design its own brand new mobile chip from the ground up. Rumors circulating say that those efforts, which began with Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi, have since gone off the tracks since many former members of that company have left since the company’s purchase. A number of them ended up at Google last month.

Whatever the effect of the purchase, we probably won’t see any changes in the lineup until at least the next iteration of both the iPhone and the iPad. Let’s hope it means faster chips with lower power consumption for even bigger battery life gains.

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The sources cited by the Evening Standard are well-informed “gossips,” but there’s evidence to suggest that this rumor may have more too it than just idle speculation, since the stock price of ARM rose significantly on the news as five-thousand shares of the company were traded, making it the biggest gainer on the day.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the company, ARM isn’t actually a chip maker itself, but instead it licenses its designs to hardware manufacturers like Apple, who will then build the tech into their own products. A prime example is the A4 chip that powers the iPad, which Apple developed in-house. The A4 is based on an ARM design. It isn’t the only one, either. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, a popular Android processor, also uses an ARM-based design. In fact, 75 percent of global devices that use 32-bit processors use ARM tech.

The Advantages of Acquisition

Apple’s bid is said to be around the $8 billion range, which sounds crazy, until you consider that Apple apparently has cash reserves of $41.7 billion on hand to fund ventures and acquisitions exactly like this one. Once acquired, ARM would allow Apple certain privileges. First of all, it wouldn’t have to license its own tech in order to develop new chips, so you can bet more projects like the A4 would go ahead, especially for Apple’s growing stable of mobile devices.

Of course, that’s not the only advantage. ARM would still likely continue to be the place most mobile device makers go to get their chip design licenses, so Apple would then gain all the revenue from that branch of the business, too. And not only would they get that revenue, but they would also be in the power position of owning the technology most of its competitors license whenever they create a new device.

Antitrust and other industry regulations would obviously prevent them from doing anything as brash as blocking competitors like those using Google’s Android OS from being granted licenses, but that’s not the only way Apple could use its new found authority. Since other hardware makers would have to apply for a license before beginning their chip development, Apple would be privy to information about its competitors’ product release plans well in advance of usual, and Cupertino would be paid for the privilege.

An Arms Race

If this is an arms race between Google and Apple, an ARM acquisition would definitely put Apple ahead in the chip department. Google only recently nabbed AdMob out from under Apple’s own bid for the company, forcing the Mac maker to look elsewhere to help back its iAds plan.

It’s only just come out that Google has since answered Apple’s acquisition of chip maker P.A. Semi with the purchase of AgniLux, a startup chip company founded by P.A. Semi employees who left that company when Apple originally acquired it. Ars Technica doesn’t think Google acquired the company with any intent of making its own chips, but as a preemptive defense against possibly having to route its chip licensing plans through Apple…it could make sense.

The most likely outcome if an ARM acquisition actually does go through? Nothing but good things for future iPhone, iPod and iPad owners. All iDevices could conceivably receive significant boosts in battery life and processor power with an entire chip design company working ’round the clock to eke more out of ever more energy conserving designs, with direct access to prototype Apple hardware to test them out on. So cross your fingers for this one, even if it does put more power in the hands of Apple than it should rightly have.

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In a decision made final last week, Apple was ordered to pay out $27.1 million to OPTi, a semiconductor company that now deals only in licensing its intellectual property. The decision came down from Eastern District of Texas court judge Chad Everingham, and it is a penalty for patent infringement on Apple’s part.

The lawsuit, filed in January 2007 and tried before the court in April of this year, centered around the accusation by OPTi that Apple had violated a patent Opti held detailing “Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.” I had no idea what it meant, either.

Turns out this is what it means, according to The Mac Observer:

When a PCI-bus controller receives a request from a PCI-bus master to transfer data with an address in secondary memory, the controller performs an initial inquire cycle and withholds TRDY# to the PCI-bus master until any write-back cycle completes. The controller then allows the burst access to take place between secondary memory and the PCI-bus master, and simultaneously and predictively, performs an inquire cycle of the L1 cache for the next cache line. In this manner, if the PCI burst continues past the cache line boundary, the new inquire cycle will already have taken place, or will already be in progress, thereby allowing the burst to proceed with, at most, a short delay. Predictive snoop cycles are not performed if the first transfer of a PCI-bus master access would be the last transfer before a cache line boundary is reached.

I’m slightly more informed now, but I’d be lying if I said I had the technical expertise to point out where exactly this kind of tech is being used in Apple products. Whatever the case, the judge thought it strong enough to decide in favor of OPTi. Which isn’t to say the matter is over with. Apple intends to appeal the decision, sources say, and it has a few channels to go through before it expends all of its options.

The good news for Apple with this ruling is that the judge found no evidence of “willful infringement,” meaning that any violation that occurred was just the innocent result of having used the same idea that OPTi had patented coincidentally, and not with the express purpose of ripping them off. As a result, Apple wasn’t required to pay OPTi’s legal fees in the matter, according to a press release (PDF) issued by the winning party.

While I understand the need for a system in which smaller companies can protect their intellectual property against much larger ones, cases like this, which aren’t exactly patent trolling but which involve a company whose sole purpose has become the licensing of ideas, really get my goat. The problem being, they affect Apple’s bottom line (which is why they’re fighting it so adamantly, even though $21.7 million isn’t a huge hit to them). Every time one of these suits goes against the Mac maker, the consumer ends up being the one who pays.

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Back in October, HardMac reported that Apple was busy testing Intel’s new “Gulftown” Xeon chip ahead of its inclusion in a refresh of the Mac Pro, which is slated for release early next year. The 32nm Gulftown chip is an evolution of the 45nm architecture found in the currently-shipping 2009 Mac Pro model.

Gulftown will be sold under the Core i9 brand name for consumer machines, while its server counterpart will be labeled the Xeon 5600 series. HardMac’s sources suggested Apple would have short-term exclusive use of the chip, much as it did for each of the last two “Xeon” revisions of the Mac Pro line.

Now, according to AppleInsider, Polish website PCLab last week published performance test results on Gulftown, showing that the new chips operated at nearly twice the speed of the previous generation chips during parallel tasks. In addition, they consumed only 50 percent as much power doing so. Sadly, the performance results are no longer available. PCLab explains:

We have been contacted by the reps of Intel Corporation. We agreed to remove the article. We will bring it back once Gulftown hits the stores, somewhere in 2010 :-)

Earlier this year I bought a 2009 Mac Pro. And – as sheer luck would have it – my purchase was delayed by one week… the very same week, as it happens, that Apple refreshed the Mac Pro line. I scoured the online store, meticulously comparing specs and searching the web for in-depth reviews of the new machine from the sort of geeks who spend their days doing nothing but benchmark testing. In short, I learned that while the Mac Pro prices went up, clock speeds came down – but I was reassured by those “in the know” that it didn’t matter the cores were (marginally) slower than before. I was still getting a more powerful machine than I’d ever need. I don’t mind admitting, though, for what I paid, I wanted my Mac Pro to be light years ahead of everything else, and I wanted it to stay that way for a long time! That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Still, Gulftown will squeeze-in an extra four physical cores above the eight I currently enjoy, and provide an extra four megabytes of L3 cache over the eight offered by my suddenly lowly-by-comparison machine. And don’t forget that 50 percent power-saving…

I’m only partially joking. Setting aside my shameful greed for ever-more-powerful hardware, the fact remains that my many-cored 2009 Mac Pro is woefully under-utilized. I do a fair bit of audio and video editing, but none of the software I use takes full advantage of multiple-processor cores. In addition, none of it is optimized for the 64-bit architecture of my machine or its Snow Leopard operating system. Final Cut doesn’t even try to be 64-bit compatible. Adobe CS4 Master Collection (in itself almost the price of a Mac Pro!) stubbornly remains a 32-bit suite.

So the bottom line is that my gloriously powerful and impressive Mac Pro is still sporting its (virtual) training wheels because, frankly, developers are dragging their heels updating their software.

That doesn’t stop me wanting the new Mac Pro, of course. Like I said, I’m greedy. But I’m also learning. And even if Apple releases this behemoth early in 2010, I don’t think I’ll be too frustrated. News of breathtakingly-more-powerful machines is tantalizing, to be sure, but until software developers really get behind this new hardware, whatever advantages these powerful new chips and architectures promise remains almost entirely academic.

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BTG claims some of Samsung’s flash chips violate patents it owns on multilevel NAND Flash memory, according to Macworld. While BTG isn’t directly accusing Apple of the infringements, this is a potential headache for the company since so many of its devices employ Samsung’s chips for internal storage.

The MacBook Air, first-generation iPhone 8GB, third-generation iPod shuffle 4GB, and second-generation iPod touch 16GB all use Samsung’s NAND memory. It is not yet known whether Apple would be implicated in a settlement/compensation agreement should the complaint be upheld.

BTG is a “licensing company” that holds the title to many patents. Its parent company, also called BTG International, is “a pharmaceutical company based in London,” reports Macworld. I won’t say this could sound like an example of a “non-practicing entity” if you won’t.

Other brands named in the complaint that use Samsung’s chips include: Dell, Sony Vaio, Lenovo, PNY and Transcend. BTG seems to know the first rule of crafting a lawsuit: Don’t stop naming names until your list of offending companies reads like a Who’s Who of the computing industry.

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This week saw Apple hiring not one, but two former ATI/AMD chip designers. Just one would be enough to arouse speculation, but two in the same week is being seen by many, including the Wall Street Journal, as nothing short of a public declaration that they do indeed intend to start building their own chips.

Note also that these hires coincide with Mark Papermaster’s official return to work at Apple, which was delayed owing to the legal settlement between them and his former employer, IBM. Papermaster was instrumental in developing the PowerPC architecture with IBM.

One of the new hires this week was Raja Koduri, who was formerly chief technology officer at AMD in their graphics group. The other person brought on board, Bob Drebin, held the very same title before Koduri. Aside from these two high-profile hires, Apple also has ongoing active job postings for various chip-related positions, including some that actually admit to involving “testing the functional correctness of Apple silicon.”

The WSJ article also reminds readers that Apple acquired chip maker P.A. Semi last year. They suggest that the chip company was then tasked with designing a brand new, more energy-efficient ARM processor for the iPhone (which has terrible battery life, as anyone who has one can attest), and that the new hires represent a continuation and extension of this strategy.

But what reason could Apple have for wanting to develop their own chips? After all, outsourcing is more cost-effective, and a preventative measure against corporate bloat. In Apple’s case, however, bringing the development of that core component of their computers and media players in-house might actually make more sense. The WSJ points out that in building their own chips, Apple (which is notoriously secretive) would have to share far less information with chip suppliers. Third-party suppliers are probably the source of most of Apple’s early product leaks, as reports from DigiTimes and other Asian news sources repeatedly indicate.

Internal chip development would also stop the flow of information from Apple to chip makers, and through them to other computer/electronic device manufacturers. It’s basically the same reason Willy Wonka used Oompa Loompah labor, which was to hamper corporate espionage. Don’t get your hopes up for catchy, cautionary song and dance numbers, though, since it looks like Apple is still limited to boring old human workers.

If Apple is working to develop their own chips, they’re going about it the right way: hiring lots of experience, and not rushing a bad or underdeveloped product out the door. The Journal expects a 2010 date for the introduction of any proprietary Apple chips, but don’t be surprised if it takes longer than that for desktops and notebooks to get Apple-designed brains.

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