RBC Capital anaylsts Doug Freedman reports Friday that Apple is in talks with Intel regarding a possible two-pronged deal:
“Intel would agree to use Apple’s preferred architecture for the iPhone — the one from Intel’s British rival, ARM Holdings,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “In return, Apple would agree to switch to Intel’s x86 architecture for the iPad.”
P.E.D. reports, “According to Freedman, Apple’s demand for 12-inch system-on-a-chip wafers in 2013 could approach 415,000 — outstripping Samsung’s ability to supply. ‘We believe,’ he writes, that “Intel has the upper-hand due to the limitations of capacity at alternative sources” — chiefly TSMC and GlobalFoundries.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Intel has the upper hand? Pfft. If they don’t get a deal with Apple, they’ll soon have no hands at all.
Besides, how many fans and extra battery capacity can Apple fit into an iPad? Nobody wants two-inch thick, liquid-cooled iPads with 5-hour battery life.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan King” for the heads up.]
For a variety of reasons…not going to happen.
Smoking crack…
….A lot of it!!
+1
Doug is obviously high. Does he live in WA or CO?
Obviously, fashion nowadays but, you don’t have to actually live in WA or CO to be that kind of high.
Agree–not happening. A move to x86 for iOS devices would negate all the ARM A series investments AAPL has made. ThoughI can see Intel fabbing & wafering for the A chips & continuing x86 for the apple workstations
Buy AMD with their Fab’s and be done with it! That’s assuming AMD has any Fabs left. Sell those Fabs to TSMC with the understanding that Apple gets top priority over capacity. Keep AMD patents, absorb all the best talent and let the rest go. Then work on getting rid of Nvidia from all their products.
“Be water my friend”. Bruce Lee.
No, built your own fab, buying AMD would cost than doing it yourself.
AMD’s current market cap is 1.2 Billion. You could probably buy AMD easily for $5B. A modern fab, like Apple wants, goes for $5-$10B, and apple would need several.
A blizzard is heading straight for Hell…
“stamped out”?!? MDN, you do realize that everyone who reads this is going to do a double-take.
Do you mean that they might actually read he article to see what MDN means? Hmmm, that would seem like a good thing for MDN…. haha
It would be interesting if the next iPad has the haswell processor with the t3 graphics
+1
Intel? We don’t need no stinkin’ Intel in our iPads! Of course, if Intel wants to *manufacture* chips to Apple’s designs, as Samsung and TSMC do, maybe Apple has something to talk about.
Apropos, just fired up my new iPad yesterday. Nice. Real nice.
If Intel were serious they’d ask for a commitment to keeping x86 on the mac and make a healthy profit supplying Apple with all the ARM chips they need.
Forget the ipad, its a done deal and i don’t see Apple switching to intel for the ipad. It would require fat binaries and a re-compile of all existing apps at the least.
I don’t think Intel has the upper hand here. PC sales are in the toilet so what good would their excess capacity do them trying to foist their crap onto Apple and what’s Apples a upside in taking that deal? Intel still haven’t proven that they can make an efficient processor for portable applications, and how many hundreds of thousands of apps would have to be rewritten or run under emulation at a painfully slow clip wasting battery power?
The iPad needs to become lighter and thinner, pronto. And after they finalize their latest light and thin model, they need to start working on an even lighter and thinner version. The last thing they could do is put those big stupid Intel chips in there. Imagine the goddamn iPad mini with Intel Inside.
Intel is not in a position to demand concessions or offsets from Apple. This story is stupid.
Please no Atom processor for iPad….
Didn’t Intel recently create some new low power chip? Haswell?
If only Apple had about $125 BILLION in cash to solve a supply or manufacturing problem like this. What will Apple do. If only!
Idiots. The value of the facility that AMD is selling to build up their cash is what Apple generates 3 times a day every day. Do these idiots really understand the scope and scale of Apple?
Clueless idiots!
Stupid reasoning. Intel has made ARM CPUs in the past, XScale.
As PC sales dwindle, Intel is going to need to make use of the foundries they already have, which cost billions to build. Partnering with Apple to manufacture hundreds of millions of SoCs is exactly what they’ll need to offset the lost production.
Here’s what I see happening (if they partner with Intel),
1. Apple buys Samsung’s Austin plants, takes over production of current A5, A5X, A6, A6X and future A7, A7X. Apple runs the plants for the next few years until these are phased out. Sells plants to Intel.
Intel retools a couple of their own plants for the A8 and beyond. A few years down the road, they buy Apple’s Austin plants and retool it for whatever the next generation is, A11? A12?
Why? So Intel can turn around and stab Apple in the back and sell the tech to another company, do it your Apple within three years.
R2,
Lighter, yes. A lot lighter, yes. Thinner, yes. A lot thinner, no. There is a point where it is just impractical to pack in all the chips, batteries, backing for stiffness, etc. You can only make these just so thin. There’s a point where the items start to become to flexible and feel cheap (like some of the competitor tablets already).
Most people think that Apple will go to an ARM based solution for everything, including Macs. My belief is that IF it happens it won’t happen before 2018 and probably not until 2020 or later.
This guy thinks Apple is going to be forced to ink some deal that goes the other way: x86 chips in the iPad. Apple needs to keep making the iPad more capable without sacrificing battery life. (One of the big complaints with the coming Surface Pro is that its battery life will suck!) In order to do this, Intel will be pitching something like the Skymont chip (based upon the Skylake architecture on a 10 nm feature size). This could possibly be the best of both worlds: Very Low Power and Very Fast. HOWEVER, that chip won’t be around for at least four years and very likely not for five years. Apple wouldn’t be shipping iPads based upon it for at least six months to a year after that.
Thus, in the extremely unlikely event that Apple does put x86 chips in the iPad, it won’t happen until 2018 or 2019.
Hmmm… the same general time frame for the switch the other way, if that happens.
2018 through 2020 could be some very interesting times!
“According to Freedman, Apple’s demand for 12-inch system-on-a-chip wafers …”
Hahahaha — Siri couldn’t fit this 12-incher — and you wouldn’t want to see a tablet that could!
Can’t quite figure out if you are just thick,,,, or are you trying to be funny?
I hope you are being sarcastic, because you DO KNOW that the 12 inch wafers would have an array of SOC chips on it (numbering up-to 20 by 20 or more)…RIGHT? A single 12 inch wafer would have hundreds of chips.
The best possible outcome is Intel fabricating Apple’s CPU designs. If Apple had access to Intel’s semiconductor process technology, they could save as much as 20% of the power their CPUs take today.
Laughable conclusion. How often have we heard that Intel is finally going to compete in small form factors. If that was going to happen we wouldn’t now have Win 8 Surface RTs and soon Win 8 Bricks with 5 hours if you re lucky battery life.
if Apple switches to x86 in iPads……… and rewrite iOS for x86?
does this anal yst knows anything about software???
GlobalFoundries (former AMD foundries) already working on ARM architecture solutions 28 nm and ARM 9 SOC. This may make a good partner.
iOS already runs on x86, and it has from the beginning. The device simulators in Xcode aren’t running an ARM emulator.
The whole iPad simulator is an emulator… It emulates everything in the iPad. And it’s running partially compiled code. Not a full binary. Therefore it an be run with very little emulation. iOS is not built for Intel processors.
No he doesn’t the Apple boat has left the dock and Intel isn’t on board. Bon Voyage!
Depends if the fans and batteries blend MDN.
Here in Oregon, Intel is expanding like Ballmer’s waistline after a trip to Outback Steakhouse. They just finished one humongous new factory and are about to start construction on a second. With the PC market declining, something is up because Intel is not stupid. I would not be surprised if Intel and Apple were cooking up some deal that will keep Intel real busy making chips for Apple.