“Apple may move beyond designing silicon and actually build its own mobile chips, rather than relying entirely on third-party suppliers like Samsung or TSMC, a new rumor claims,” AppleInsider reports.
“Apple’s alleged buy-in to an unnamed chip fabrication plant is not a ‘trivial’ investment, a report published Friday by SemiAccurate claims,” AppleInsider reports. “The full report remains hidden behind a $1,000-per-year paywall, but tags accompanying the story may reveal Apple’s rumored mystery partner: United Microelectronics Corporation.”
AppleInsider reports, “UMC is a Taiwan-based chipmaker that has been around since 1980 and currently trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s name has been connected to Apple rumors in the past, but none at the scale of building CPUs for the iPhone maker.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: The original article, “Exclusive: Apple has a fab, will make their own chips” has been pulled without explanation over at SemiAccurate.
Perhaps the original article was semi-inaccurate.
Remember this guy?
Guess he didn’t take into account that Apple would start building its own chips. That will not only add much needed diversification but take a lot of pressure off TSMC to meet Apple’s growing demands.
Brilliant move, Tim.
Been waiting for this. How much can it possibly cost? A few hundred million? A billion? Ten billion? Any conceivable amount seems like “Yeh, whatever” to Apple’s cash pile.
Too bad for the US that so much of the “Yeh, whatever” pile resides offshore, making it more likely Apple will build its fab over there.
Over there is exactly where it should be built. The corporate tax climate, union and regulation conditions make manufacturing in America too risky and unprofitable for many companies.
Nice read from the reactionary conservative script. Not actually fact-based, but sounds good in small doses and certainly supports the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Will you be in the favored group when the 1% becomes the 1/2%?
And this move should be dovetailed with an Apple ISP bypass solution, to create total independence and uncompromised control of the user experience.
If true, it would be a fabricator for amd or one of amd plants (if they still have any)
The downside to rolling your own is the environmental liability. Chipmaking used to be a nasty business and probably still is.
It’s called buying off the local inspectors and government.
Who cares about tree hugging hippies when there is progress to be made?
Hopefully this is the start of apple making its own desktop chips.
It would be nice to see intel out of business, they’ve been hurting the apple user experience for years