[TweakTown] Intel claims Apple would be lost without their chips

[Makaveli]

I don't even...

lol dude i'm still trying to figure out what that guy is smoking!

And I think this story is bogus, Apple would be stupid to switch!

 

[scannall]

I think Apple would be fine if they did this, but I think they won't. Apple has been working with intel for nearly a decade and I would think that intel would put the effort into giving apple whatever they needed for a given device. That said, ARM is looking like a more and more attractive option for the macbook line. I just don't see Apple doing it.


If intel fails to deliver skylake and that becomes a fiasco, then maybe Apple would switch. Macbooks sell fine with intel chips, why fix something that isn't broken?

I'm sure Apple is pretty unhappy with the constant delivery delays Intel has been stuck in for a while. That being said, I still don't see a change. If there is any meat at all on these bones, it would be to push Intel to start delivering on time.

 

[witeken]

I'm sure Apple is pretty unhappy with the constant delivery delays Intel has been stuck in for a while. That being said, I still don't see a change. If there is any meat at all on these bones, it would be to push Intel to start delivering on time.

Intel has one less than stellar node, and suddenly it's all doom and gloom.

 

[positivedoppler]

Apple has 160 billion in cash which is about the same as Intel's current market cap. If they wanted to, they can buy up Nvidia, AMD, Global Foundries and severely out R&D Intel to get whatever they want. I think Intel is being a tad arrogant thinking Apple be lost without them. Heck, APple has enough cash to engineer a hostile takeover of Intel if it wanted to.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Intel has one less than stellar node, and suddenly it's all doom and gloom.

This couldn't have come at a worse time.

 

[witeken]

This couldn't have come at a worse time.

You should tell ASML that.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Apple has 160 billion in cash which is about the same as Intel's current market cap. If they wanted to, they can buy up Nvidia, AMD, Global Foundries and severely out R&D Intel to get whatever they want. I think Intel is being a tad arrogant thinking Apple be lost without them. Heck, APple has enough cash to engineer a hostile takeover of Intel if it wanted to.

Apple havent gotten rich buy wasting money. And Apple knows there is no way on earth they can compete with Intel, without either buying Intel or throwing so much money down the drain they would never recover it.

Apple knows Intel is right. Business is business. Personal feelings is left outside.

 

[witeken]

Of course. With $160,000M you can do anything!

I think with so much money, Apple has to responsibility to risk (invest) the money in something extraordinary, something you can only do with that much money. Like starting an extraterrestrial space program. They could surely get a lot of return on investment by mining rare Earth elements.

 

[Fox5]

Meh, like anyone buys Apple for the performance.

Apple had decent market share back when they used IBM chips and were way behind Intel.
The bread and butter of their market, the iMacs, Macbook Airs, and 13" Macbook Pro could easily get by with a chip made by Apple. Possibly even the 15", given that most people don't buy Macs for performance.
And if you think it's so unrealistic for Apple to match Intel in performance (or at least come close enough), well all they have to do is what AMD and IBM used to do, sacrifice about 1/3rd of their density in order to use SOI or a similarly exotic process. Apple probably has enough market share that it would be worthwhile for them to fund a high performance SOI node just for their own use if they needed to improve performance per watt by 1/3 to 1/2.

 

[oobydoobydoo]

Apple havent gotten rich buy wasting money. And Apple knows there is no way on earth they can compete with Intel, without either buying Intel or throwing so much money down the drain they would never recover it.

Apple knows Intel is right. Business is business. Personal feelings is left outside.

Apple have gotten rich by outmaneuvering and innovating way faster than any of the competition. Intel can't compete, and really only even has any marketshare at all because they throw money at vendors like Dell with P4 and contra revenue Bay Trail.

Intel knows Apple is right. Business is design, and products that inspire no feelings can be thrown aside (like all of intel's products). Who will miss intel when they are gone? I can't think of a single reason why anybody would... their products inspire no emotion. They are boring... and now they don't even offer good performance.

 

[podspi]

They are boring... and now they don't even offer good performance.

Compared to...?

 

[controlflow]

Apple have gotten rich by outmaneuvering and innovating way faster than any of the competition. Intel can't compete, and really only even has any marketshare at all because they throw money at vendors like Dell with P4 and contra revenue Bay Trail.

Intel knows Apple is right. Business is design, and products that inspire no feelings can be thrown aside (like all of intel's products). Who will miss intel when they are gone? I can't think of a single reason why anybody would... their products inspire no emotion. They are boring... and now they don't even offer good performance.

Agreed, Intel has no innovation and doesn't bring anything useful to the world of computing. Conroe, Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, 22nm FinFET, etc are all just garbage technologies/products from Intel that came about with dirty tricks like contra revenue.

If Intel vanishes tomorrow, we'll be much better off using the mighty all knowing and all seeing ARM cores to power all the world's supercomputers and data centers instead of the useless low IPC Intel Xeon cores. We'll also use the class leading AMD FX built on the cutting edge 32nm planer GloFlo process for our desktops and laptops. /Sarcasm


Troll harder.

 

[oobydoobydoo]

How about Apple A9X chips on Samsungs Cutting edge 14nm FF process? That's a process that has several advantages:

-They don't have to pay intel's ridiculous margins
-They don't need to use crappy x86 architecture
-They don't have to worry about false TDP measurements meant to hide poor power efficiency

Best of all, they don't need to worry about waiting on intel to sort out all the problems it has to release new products. They can just go to somebody who actually knows how to design a 14nm chip that works, like Samsung.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Best of all, they don't need to worry about waiting on intel to sort out all the problems it has to release new products. They can just go to somebody who actually knows how to design a 14nm chip that works, like Samsung.

You can go out and buy 14nm Intel parts today. Can you say the same about Samsung?

 

[oobydoobydoo]

You can go out and buy 14nm Intel parts today. Can you say the same about Samsung?

I already stated that I think Apple will stick with intel. I don't think they are ready to switch, and I think intel might have something to offer with Skylake. Broadwell, however, does not impress me.


I think this should be a wake up call to intel and they should take note that they can only maintain absurd margins if they offer an absurd amount of performance in comparison to their competitors. Lately, that has not been the case. Whether that is a result of all "low hanging fruit" being picked, a lack of talent, or a lack of funding.... I don't know. The answer will come when Skylake is released. I think the only scenario where Apple ditches intel, is one in which Skylake is somehow borked and Apple finds out about it.

 

[controlflow]

Pretty odd how the foundries have been late or overpromised plenty of times in the past and it is easily forgiven, Intel brings a class leading 14nm process late to market but still ahead of everyone else and all of a sudden the sky is falling and people claim that Intel is too slow to deliver on new process nodes. I don't understand the logic here.

 

[controlflow]

-They don't have to pay intel's ridiculous margins

Intel's margins on mobile are very low. It is very high for Core since it is by far the best on the market. You pay to have the best and the market supports this idea. Why aren't you complaining about margins on Apple products?

-They don't need to use crappy x86 architecture

This nonsense has been debunked time and time again. The ISA is hardly that relevant as far as CPU design goes. Provide some evidence to back your point.

Best of all, they don't need to worry about waiting on intel to sort out all the problems it has to release new products. They can just go to somebody who actually knows how to design a 14nm chip that works, like Samsung.

What is the evidence that Samsung knows how to do this? All they have shipped so far are PowerPoint slides. Despite all the delays at Intel, no one else has a comparable product or process tech.

 

[poohbear]

Apple made a mistake 10 years ago by choosing Intel and they are now suffering because of that mistake, if they have choose AMD instead of Intel then they would't have suffered at all...

That rumor that Apple is going to make own CPU is possible though there will be people mad when they switch then again AMD has opened section for their customers to order chips that comply to their needs...

If Apple switches to AMD then it would need a lot less work then if they switched to ARM, only thing they would need to do is recompile and optimizations for AMD CPU's and AMD did gave a hint about products being in place for 2016 and AMD's "Zen" is out in 2016... So Apple could switch to AMD which would use sub 20nm process nm process for Zen which is a completely new CPU that AMD is designing... There is no doubt that it will approach Ivy or Haswell in IPC or even exceed it since veterans that created CPU's that outperformed Intel's CPU's by a wide margin.

lol so Apple is suffering? its the richest company in the world right now. How exactly would they be doing better if they didn't go with intel? number 1 is number 1, there's nowhere to go from there except down.

 

[SAAA]

I choose #2 but clearly that depends on a lot of things: first and most important how long Intel can keep up with the innovation and bleeding edge process (even future one not based on silicon), if they can at least for mobile chips (not phone parts) then Apple will easily stick to them because that's were the better performance/power resides.

It's the higher end differently from what many think here that worries me: being limited by only one high performance architecture (Core and followers) Intel can't put out extreme solutions like say IBM power8 and possible future products, say from AMD or ARM.
High end doesn't care too much of consumption and price but rather of raw performance, so it's definitely possible that any change happens here first, were margins are much higher too.

 

[svarog19]

lol so Apple is suffering? its the richest company in the world right now. How exactly would they be doing better if they didn't go with intel? number 1 is number 1, there's nowhere to go from there except down.

And so what? Intel is milking as much as possible from Apple, so why Apple should't look for alternatives that would increase their margins?

If they didn't went with Intel they would have considerably larger profit margins.

 

[B-Riz]

ARM is designed for mobile first.

If an ARM desktop class CPU decided to compete with a desktop class Intel on performance, it would have similar power requirements.

The x86 *software* eco-system (programs available / development structure) is too big and established.

Intel not only leads on commodity CPU availability, but has huge influence on software development.

Read this Google Research paper, only 2 pages, offers many worthy points that can be extrapolated to desktop use.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/36448.pdf

"Key Finding 8: The choice of power or performance optimized
core designs impacts core power use more than ISA."

http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/isa-power-struggles-tr.pdf

So Apple wanting an ARM cpu that does not *lose* performance compared to what it already has, would net to nothing but a lot of wasted money.

It would be re-inventing the wheel at this point.

ARM looks great for mobile / low-power because that is what is designed to do.

 

[B-Riz]

Also, how many people buy Mac's that run Boot Camp to be able to run Windows?

 

[avAT]

Also, how many people buy Mac's that run Boot Camp to be able to run Windows?

Full Bootcamp? Not many.

Either way, Apple surely doesn't consider that function important for their business, and the potential to drop prices $100-$200 would generate far more sales than something like the lack of Bootcamp would lose.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

Apple could kiss their entire OSX series of products goodbye without Intel.

The Apple people buy their desktops for OSX (and the Apple logo). If Apple could suddenly squeeze FX 8350's inside their Imacs, the Apple fans would still buy them (and probably would barely notice).

With Apple's deep pockets -- they could probably build their own fab (and buy AMD).... So they could make their own desktop x86 CPU's if they wanted. They don't seem interested, since most of their sales come from iOS devices.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

I eventually owned a Dreamcast, PS2, GC and Xbox at some point in my life and I've been part of lots of discussions like this about 10 year ago. Today I couldn't care less about any of them. Your carefully chosen screenshots and childish rant won't change my personal opinion. Xbox easily had the best graphics in that generation followed by the Cube as a distant second and then the mighty PS2.

Agreed. Nothing from its respective era could match the original Xbox for graphics. The Gamecube had decent graphics, but considering the original Xbox had the horsepower to go up to 720p or 1080i -- it was a monster compared to what the Gamecube could manage.