David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s worth taking a quick pause here that that 86 million figure, you might think how could a company of 150 employees that was around for four years that needs to design and manufacture microprocessors and systems on a chip or I guess just microprocessors, how could they only raise that much money. It’s because they were a fabless chip company. They were not actually making these things themselves. What most people do is they use a chip fab in China or somewhere else with less expensive labor cost to manufacture the chips and they themselves are designing the architecture and laying out the board. And actually, there was a lot of speculation when Texas Instruments invested in P.A. Semi that their fabrication plants because TI has their own chip fabs would be used to manufacture those processors. So, that was kind of big strategic investor for them. Yeah, totally. What’s funny though when the acquisition happened – and I was going back and re-reading some of the articles about the deal when it came out, I don’t know Ben if you saw the same thigs – most people didn’t really realize that this was about the iPhone. Because this is 2008 and I believe the 3G had come out at this point. Not yet the 3GS. But the iPhone was still pretty small, like it had a lot of buzz but people didn’t really realize yet that the iPhone was about to become Apple and that the Mac was going to take a backseat. People were still thinking about the iPod as still I believe at that point, I’m not sure, but roughly the same size or bigger than the iPhone. So all the press at the time of the deal, they were really confused about like why is Apple finally being P.A. Semi, they switched to Intel? Are they thinking about a new ultraportable that they’re bring out that they might bring back the PowerPC architecture? I mean, it is interesting. I’d love to get your take on this. They were clearly brilliant people there that were specially brilliant at chip design. But they weren’t working on ARM processors.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.