Unlike Intel (and for that matter Qualcomm), they do not need to build a general purpose chip, but one targeted at their specific needs. Now Apple has a market of hundreds of millions of iPhones and enough money to make the incremental cost of developing higher performance SoCs reasonable. Intel by contrast was selling millions of computers and speed mattered to them. Motorola's largest customer for their PPC chip was Ford and they needed neither high performance nor really low power. FPGAs made it so it was better to do the R&D for the mass market and then just build one's high end gear by using a bigger/faster version of the same FPGA and adding ports/features.Īpple, IBM and Motorola never had the volume to make PowerPC successful for the high end. In the old days a company developed high end gear and then used that research to build cheaper versions for the larger market. He said that FPGAs changed the way the industry worked. Click to expand.A friend used to own/run a high end location sound hardware company (they make audio recorders for film sets).

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