The rest of the device specs aren’t shabby either. It’s an Android 2.3 device with a 3.5-inch capacitive-touch display, a 5-megapixel camera, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal memory and an expandable microSD slot with a 2GB card included. It only has 3G wide-area connectivity, but it also sports Wi-Fi and can be used as a mobile hotspot.

Those specs may not impress your typical Galaxy Nexus owner, but then again, they’re not intended to. Sprint is targeting the phone at families, and it’s not hard to imagine parents latching onto the low-cost device after months of listening to their children nagging them about a smartphone. To drive the point home, Sprint is shipping the device with its bevy of family services including: giving parents the power to manage their kids’ usage, track them down through GPS and shut off their access while they’re at school or during dinner.

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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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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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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Ltd. (TSMC)   is the company that will be supplying the A6 to Apple, according to the report. Reuters reported last month that the chipmaker was getting underway with trial production, but this latest report seems to suggest that trial production hadn’t yet begun in earnest until now.

The current A5 chip that powers the iPad 2, and is rumored to power the upcoming iPhone 5, is supplied by Samsung, but reports have long suggested that Apple was considering moving their chip production to TSMC, which is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry as measured by market share. Apple is also thought to be looking to move some of its business away from Samsung, since the two companies are involved in a complicated and volatile legal battle in various courts worldwide.

The A6, based on the ARM chip architecture, will use TSMC’s new 28-nanometer process, along with 3D stacking technologies. That will make for an extremely low-powered chip that’s also capable of blowing away the A4 and A5 in terms of processing ability, since those designs both use layered instead of 3D designs. The 3D stacking tech will allow layers to be integrated vertically and horizontally into one single circuit. Computerworld’s Jonny Evans suggested in July that such a design could make for a processor powerful enough, in theory, to replace Intel chips in future MacBook Airs, so they should extend the iPad’s capabilities considerably.

Taiwan Economic News says TSMC and Apple had discussed working together on past chips, but the chipmaker didn’t have the spare production capacity to take on the iPad maker as a customer. Owing to a downturn in the industry this year, the publication says TSMC now has room to fill Apple’s orders.

While it may be disappointing to some that it’s looking less likely we’ll see an iPad 3 this year, an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 released so close together isn’t a smart play for Apple anyway, as I noted earlier this year. The iPad continues to dominate the tablet space, and Apple is currently doing a good job of keeping its competition from even being able to sell their products. Even if we won’t get to see a new iPad product before 2012, the news that TSMC is getting underway with its chipmaking plans ahead of ramping up for full production in the first quarter of 2011 is still an exciting prospect for fans eager to see what’s coming next from Apple.

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It’s interesting that Intel looks to the iPad, because Apple uses its own, in-house A4 and A5 processors in that tablet, which are based on technology licensed by ARM, Intel’s primary chip design competitor for mobile devices. Recent rumors have suggested Apple may be considering a move to similar ARM-based designs for its MacBook line, though that wouldn’t be possible for at least another couple of years. Kilroy dismissed such speculation, citing the comparative power of Intel and ARM chips:

Go look at the performance of those platforms. They’re taking our latest and high-end end versions of second-generation core, and ARM doesn’t even come close to any capability there.

He wouldn’t go so far as to guarantee that Intel will be included in future MacBook products, but obviously that’s not something Apple would ever allow a manufacturing partner to do, even if a deal was in fact in place.

Meanwhile, at Intel’s annual investor day yesterday, CEO Paul Otellini addressed the perception that Intel is losing the mobile processing game by pointing out that his company still makes the most money on smartphones and tablets today. He says (via Barron’s) that’s because “the money is in the infrastructure,” and Intel is still very much the leader in supplying data-center oriented processors, which are in high demand to support connected mobile devices.

Otellini also brought up Intel’s role as a chip foundry, noting, “[i]f you look at the profitability around the smartphone chips, it’s mostly going to the foundry guys.” Intel is reportedly interested in becoming a foundry partner for Apple, which seems to want to expand beyond its main processor supplier for the iPad, Samsung. Samsung is arguably Apple’s most significant hardware competitor when it comes to mobile devices, thanks to the successful Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets.

Apple just unveiled new iMacs featuring the Intel Sandy Bridge line of processors, and the company is expected to release similarly equipped MacBook Air notebooks soon. According to all the obvious signs, the relationship between Apple and Intel has never been tighter. Intel could do far worse than hitch its mobile hopes to Apple’s wagon, and between Apple’s NC data center and a foundry deal, it would certainly be doing just that.

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According to the EE Times, Richard says that his sources indicate Intel (which recently made forays into the foundry business) is competing for some of Apple’s chip-making capacity. Apple is reportedly looking around for additional suppliers of the A4 and A5 chips it uses to power its iPod touch, iPhone and iPad devices, in an effort to reduce its reliance on Samsung, its existing manufacturing partner for Apple’s ARM-based application processors. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) has been cited as a new foundry partner for Apple in the past, but Richard says Intel is another likely candidate.

It does make sense for the two to partner, as Intel would become one of the largest ARM suppliers (and therefore a major player in the mobile device market), and Apple would be able to distance itself from Samsung, which it recently took to court for patent infringement (Samsung countersued in response). Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones, tablets and now portable media players are Apple’s closest competition in terms of post-PC device dominance. The cosy supplier relationship between the two companies won’t be as easy to maintain as Samsung’s star continues to rise.

Intel would also benefit, as it owns its own manufacturing plants, which are expensive to build and more economical to run full-out — producing chips even when there is no demand. Additionally, as semiconductor designers make chips that pack in more transistors, the chips themselves become smaller, and more fit on a single wafer of silicon.

Essentially, it means that Intel is producing more and more chips as its semiconductor designs get better. But since it has so far missed the mobile wave, it is faced with a coming future where it has multi-billion fabs producing more and more chips that fewer people want. Sure, the demand for Intel’s PC and server chips will continue, but Intel can’t afford to stay on the sidelines of the mobile revolution, so if it can’t get there with its own silicon, it may decide to get there making someone else’s. Then its capital investment in manufacturing — which has been all but abandoned by most chip design firms who now outsource their chipmaking — will still contribute to the bottom line.

Richard notes that any significant shift in Apple’s foundry supplier relationships will take as much as a few years to materialize. That’s because of how Apple manages its supply chain, part of which involves signing high-volume contracts in order to lock-in prices and create component scarcity for competitor products.

With additional reporting from Stacey Higginbotham.

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The presentation, as reported by Fudzilla, was about AMD’s upcoming Fusion platform. Fusion is AMD’s new Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), which combines both CPU and GPU capabilities on a single-die processor. The platform is expected to debut in early 2011, and should make it easier for software developers to leverage the computing power of both types of processor.

During Ghilardi’s presentation, he showed one slide featuring Apple’s iMac and Mac Pro computers, with official Apple branding and even a “Courtesy of Apple” attribution at the bottom, during a segment about hardware partner. The AMD executive didn’t comment, saying only “I’ll flash through them very quickly.”

AMD announced yesterday that some Fusion shipments have already started making their way into manufacturer’s hands, so it’s entirely possible that Apple is already playing with the the APUs in pre-production test units. Which could mean we’ll see AMD-equipped Macs as soon as first or second quarter next year.

The introduction of the Fusion platform would mean that Apple will be parting ways with Intel for the first time since it originally partnered with the chipmaker in January of 2006 for a Core Duo-powered iMac. Since then, Apple Intel has provided the processor for the entire Mac line of computers, including the most recently announced MacBook Air.

Fusion is said to provide advantages in terms of visuals, power and design simplicity, and ease of software development. All of these are things that would appeal to Apple, a company focused on providing visually stunning displays and ever simpler system internals. And if Fusion really does make it easier for developers to leverage processing power, it should be a perfect fit with the upcoming Mac App Store.

UPDATE: A spokesman for AMD said that the slide in question was included simply to indicate that Apple is a current AMD hardware partner, not to indicate that it will or won’t be a Fusion platform user in the future. The representative couldn’t comment about Apple’s possible adoption of Fusion processors in upcoming models.

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Previously, there was an option for a Core i7 processor running at 2.66GHz over the standard Core i5, clocked at 2.53 GHz, for an additional $200. That options remains, but for true power users, this may be a nice way to eliminate the need for that Core i7 iMac and simply add a 27-inch Apple Cinema Display to your home office if you’re often working from the road. My preferred configuration is to get a new MacBook Air and go with the Core i7 iMac, but the new Air may not meet your processing needs.

The $400 price is pretty steep for the upgrade, but that’s just a reminder that despite lower prices among its other offerings, Apple still caters very much to the high end of computing market.

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The latest example comes from Accent. In May Accent launched its ASMgrid platform, which promises to integrate multiple smart meter functions — including a host of communications options, which the company calls a first for smart grid SoCs — into one platform. Earlier this week, the Milan, Italy-based company raised 5 million euros ($6.9 million) from Tallwood Venture Capital to speed that development process.

“To develop a silicon device from the ground up can be a two-year process,” Accent marketing director Ed Pazmino told me. “We’ve done this development in advance. That enables a customer to get to a solution in just three to six months.”

Accent already counts smart meter maker Itron as a customer. But it’s not the only one tackling the “smart meter on a chip” challenge. Freescale came out last year with its MCF51EM microcontroller family providing a host of advanced metering functions on one SoC. Teridian Semiconductor has a line of SoCs focused on more accurate power measurement for smart meters. Last month, ST Microelectronics’power line communications SoC was adopted by Spanish utility Iberdrola for its smart meter plans.

For smart grid device makers, there are some clear advantages to using SoCs instead of mixing and matching different bits of silicon on their own. But there are also challenges to the “smart meter on a chip” approach. Some smart meter makers might worry about lack of flexibility to mix and match communications, power measurement and processors based on particular applications. Of course, a lot of these integrated chipsets also share common components — lots of them use ARM microprocessors, for instance, including Accent.

Then there’s the evolving nature of the smart grid technology landscape to consider. Right now utility smart grids are pieced together from a host of different, often proprietary, mostly incompatible technologies. That problem is put in clear perspective with Accent’s new goal of incorporating communications technologies, such as ZigBee and powerline carrier (PLC), into its SoC plans. For example, Accent in March landed a deal with Chinese powerline carrier communications maker Topscomm to develop SoCs for devices being built for China’s potentially huge smart grid market. But those systems will use Topscomm’s PLC technology rather than Accent’s, Pazmino said.

Indeed, SoC makers must keep in close contact with different technologies being developed for different regional markets. While Spanish utility Iberdrola is settling on a powerline carrier standard for its smart meter communications, French utility EDF has its own PLC technology under development. China, a potentially huge market, has special needs from would-be PLC technologies, such as the ability to communicate over distribution lines with lots of interference, or “noise,” to contend with.

At the same time, chipmakers point to regions like China, India and Latin America as potential growth areas for smart meters on a chip. While North America and Europe are dominated by a handful of huge meter vendors and smart grid equipment makers, emerging economies have more local metering companies that might want to leap right into the smart meter world with a product designed largely around one SoC.

Semiconductor companies are also looking at offering SoCs with different levels of complexity. While Accent is going for the higher-end smart meter market, NXP is going after simpler needs with its EM773 integrated circuit, built to give typical devices like power switches and outlets the ability to report how much energy they’re using.

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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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