Apple Has 1,000 Engineers Working On Chips For The Post-PC Era

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As we ponder what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs, I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a veteran Silicon Valley CEO who knew Jobs. This was just after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple. We got to talking about why Apple is so well-positioned in the post-PC era, and this executive zeroed in on something you don't hear too often. "Steve Jobs told me he has 1,000 engineers working on chips," he said. "Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything."Not only are Apple's processors extremely power efficient, but Apple is also removing the hard drives from its products and replacing them with flash memory chips. It's not just iPhones and iPads, the MacBook Air's memory is also flash. All of Apple's products are moving in this direction. When you combine these two fundamental changes at the silicon level, "form factor no longer becomes an issue," explained the Silicon Valley CEO. ]]>

Intel predicts 1,200 quintillion transistors in the world by 2015

Intel predicts the increased demand for what it calls the 'compute continuum' will result in a mind blowing 1,200 quintillion transistors in the world by the year 2015.

Today there are more than 4 billion connected devices in the world and that move to mobility has created "an unprecedented demand for the most fundamental enabler for the digital age – the transistor," said Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, today at the Intel Developer Forum.

In terms of the number of transistors this transition to pervasive connectivity led to a huge surge in the early 2000's, reaching around 5 quintillion transistors by 2005.

In the five years since then demand has grown exponentially, by around fifteen times, to around 80 quintillion by the end of 2010.

The continued explosion of connected devices and the subsequent data centres needed to cater for them has driven this continual rise.

Intel estimates the number of transistors needed to store, manage and interpret the data we'll all create over the next five years will take us past the one sextillion mark.

That's 1,000 quintillions.

"This makes the transistor usage over the last three decades look like a flat line by comparison," said Otellini.

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