Here’s something we didn’t expect: By purchasing P.A. Semi, a company known for its design of sophisticated, low-power chips, Apple may be crimping some plans held by none other than the U.S. Department of Defense. This is because, according to a source involved in a company that makes embedded computer boards with P.A. Semi processors, at least ten defense systems utilize the PWRficient CPU. One program forecasts the need for up to 70,000 of the chips over the next ten years.
So it’s understandable that when P.A. Semi informed its customers it was being acquired and it could no longer guarantee supplies of its chips, some feathers may have been ruffled. And by feathers, I mean missiles.
P.A. Semi is acclaimed for its power efficient chips that pack high performance while consuming less power than competitors. Defense behemoths like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon use these chips, and there’s no telling how they’ll react to the acquisition news. Let’s hope they don’t go nuclear.
[Via EETimes]
No telling how they'll react?.....
Better An American company then a ferengi.
No doubt that Apple will take a great chip and improve on it. I don't see any secret plans by Apple to create a NEW World Order
simply because the Defense Department relies on these chips.
Apple is still a growing company and doing what other great companies do, expand. Moving into other areas in technology is a good sign that Apple intends to move forward into the future and deliver the best product at a lower cost to them.
I take it we'll be seeing a new range of brushed aluminium iCBMs ?
I thought this company designed the chips but didn't actually handle the fabrication? If that's the case, continuing production is a mere licensing issue, one that probably generates cash at that. Apple would have had to know beforehand if their resources were tied up with some project they were contracted for, so any such obligation must not have been something Apple saw as a deal-breaker.
I think the security of the world and the U.S. in particular sees a far greater threat from counterfeit products, such as "Cisco" routers, that have actually found their way into use in what are supposed to be secure environments.
I don't know if it's possible to do a sort of visual x-ray md5 or sha1 examination of chips and their internal design/programming, but it does seem like we need some method of assuring that things we design that are built elsewhere don't come back with support for a hidden agenda.
Maybe this is a good time for some public examination of other hidden features in products. ID info hidden in things we print, cell phones that can go into an eavesdrop mode, RFID chips in car tires, wireless routers having hidden log files and sending data when they do a timeserver lookup, hard drive firmware that reserves space for keyloggers in the bad blocks area... do those things exist? Should this sort of thing be allowed at all, and if so by who? Let's hope the good guys are really good guys.
I think Apple is the least of our fears.
I remember I laughed when a PC virus came along that could remotely turn on the webcam and microphone without an indication. I guess it's really not that funny...
It's kinda foolish to assume that every piece of malware is doing some dirty work in mass and is easily spotted. Who is to say there isn't something sitting there that make compromise of any ONE machine something that can be done at will? Even the best OSes have had vulnerabilities. And certainly a vulnerability can be in hardware or software.