The Fire Phone was Jeff Bezos' personal baby, and we know how that went. Then there was the Apple G4 Cube with Steve Jobs, the Model X' Falcon Wing doors and Elon, and lets not even talk about the Metaverse and Zuck.
I'd rather guess that Jeff Bezos' opinion on what makes a good phone is/was different on the opinion of many potential buyers.
I imagine when you are a billionaire from one company, every time you hear the name of the company you hear your name, so you can't really think about what Joe Schmoe wants in a phone independently of your ego.
I guess this is what Steve Jobs was better at. SOME focus on the customer independent of his ego and Apple Apple Apple. I did say ... SOME.
Because the CEO was behind it, breathing down their necks.
If you consider that outcome a worthwhile endeavor, I don't know what else to say.
He's talking about an endeavour reaching the market.
I'm sure if Zuckerberg wants to spend $10B on Nuclear Fusion it will happen.
https://www.esgdive.com/news/meta-inks-nuclear-deals-terrapo...
…and if they do all of this, it’ll be closer to $20B than 10!
As another commenter said, Broadcom is very experienced with backend design (as well as the supply chain management, testing, etc. that comes after the chip is taped out) and so this can't be regarded as a "first chip". Richard Ho (the head of hardware at OpenAI) is also extremely experienced and used to be the head of the Google TPU effort -- where he actually worked with Broadcom in a similar tapeout already. So yes, this is not a "first design"!
A big part of the semiconductor industry also operates on a reputation basis. Broadcom (like TSMC) is a neutral party as a design house, but if they did something like this, it might ruin that reputation.
My recollection is that PA Semi was very much for the architectural and design talent, even though it was an “asset purchase” and all the existing Power & military chips were hived off.
For Intrinsity I recall a lot of interest was actually in their existing graphics work and EDA. ISTR that those early mobile GPUs were what they focused on.
I was in the mansfield org circa ‘07-11. I spent a lot of time flying between cupertino and austin/bee caves that first year.
Whoever it was, whooo, that's hot shit. I remember an M1 MacBook Air just cleaning the clock of an Intel MacBook Pro and thinking "x86_64 has real competition again".
Great silicon. I'm over it with not having root on my own machine, so I've left the ecosystem, but it's really nice hardware, can't dispute that.
And a lot of them are sitting under Qualcomm via the Nuvia acquisition.