OPINION: Apple's seed
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 8/22/2008
AUG. 22 | THE EVER-ACTIVE Apple rumor mill has been whirring since the company’s third-quarter earnings call last month, when chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer referred cryptically to a “future product transition that I can’t discuss with you today.”
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
Oppenheimer offered the comment as a partial explanation of why he expects Apple’s gross margin to be slightly lower over the next few quarters than investors are used to.
Since he didn’t say “future product,” most analysts interpreted the comment as a reference to a new feature or capability Apple plans to introduce to its existing products.
And, since whatever it is will apparently have a near-term impact on margins, speculation quickly narrowed to some new, specialized chip or chip set Apple is planning to add to its devices, which, like most new chips, would be expensive at first but would fall in cost as volumes increase.
What sort of chip might it be, and for what specialized task?
Writing in his blog, The Pulpit, earlier this month, PBS technology guru Robert X. Cringely speculated (he would say deduced) that it is a dedicated H.264 encoder/decoder chip sources from NTT in Japan.
Why would that be useful? Because, according to Cringely, the NTT chip can compress 1080p video using the H.264 codec into about 4MB per second, compared to the current threshold of 20MB/s, without having to tie up CPU cycles.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
