THE The New York Times returned to highlight the efforts of some companies like Apple to create their own processors, outlining an estimate of the investments made by them in this area. The research carried out by the newspaper suggests that they are saving money in the manufacture of semiconductors by taking care only of research involving the design and creation of the chips, signing contracts with third parties to take care of the mass production of the units.
However, even without investing in building proper facilities for the creation of processors, Apple, Qualcomm and NVIDIA still spend a very high amount on research and development (R&D). In the case of A4, created for the iPad, it is estimated that investments made without the need to build a factory have exceeded the barrier of US $ 1 billion, because it was a small example in this area, Intel invested seven times more than this just to adapt your processors Nehalem (launched in 2009) for notebooks at the beginning of the year.
Building a dedicated processor factory would cost a company like Apple another $ 3 billion, according to the NYTimes. Even using these chips in a limited number of its own products, it still has the potential to become one of the largest technology providers for mobile devices, as its iPhone OS-based gadgets continue to grow in the market.
(via 9 to 5 Mac)
