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Apple Reportedly Buys Into a Chip Fab, Looking to Produce Its Own Chips
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WTF, you have one job MacRumors. Take some of that ad revenue and conquer the paywall instead of leaving us hanging until someone in the forums coughs some hard earned cash to do it themselves.
It's a bit premature to say that SemiAccurate was wrong in claiming that Macs would switch to ARM processors. I agree that they are wrong, but their claim stated that the switch wouldn't happen until after mid-2013, which we just got to.
Well, they're not really rebranding existing chip designs, but rather buying an existing foundry to manufacture their own chip designs.
That's of course, if this rumor pans out.
And corporations just hire people like Jobs to do the work... If people at Apple did it, it would just be a group of employees that Apple bought out. The phrase I've heard repeatedly is to start a corporation, hire people who are smarter than you.
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Bad troll is a bad troll. If you really believed that, you wouldn't own so many apple products now would you?
Well I can see why they would want to do this. But the risk is that you " end up betting on the wrong horse" (anyone remember Motorola...or even IBM?).
If SamSung or any other "Apple black list" supplier suddenly has a breakthrough product that all your rivals jump on...you'll be left in the dust.
If SamSung or any other "Apple black list" supplier suddenly has a breakthrough product that all your rivals jump on...you'll be left in the dust.
"TSMC executives told the WSJ that Apple had asked to either invest in the company or to have TSMC set aside a factory specifically for Apple chips. Executives said they had denied both options because they wanted to keep TSMC's independence and manufacturing flexibility intact." Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/2...roduce-a-series-chips-for-future-ios-devices/
If this rumor turns out to be true, it's not surprising that APPLE would want to acquire their own foundry. It's a logical next step, in light of APPLE's failed attempt to get TSMC to put aside an entire factory to manufacture chips for APPLE exclusively. If financially feasible, this is just another step by APPLE to be better able to control their own future.
It is not about labor cost at all. If you do any research, the reason China is the place to manufacture chips and a lot of technology is because China controls and owns world's largest reserves of rare metals. They're not selling or exporting them to US for manufacturing here, and US can't get to them either. Very competitive market in Africa where a lot of these metals are mined.
Hard to wrap my head around this. Why would they do this? Fabs are difficult and expensive to run. Assuming this is true I'll guess that it is for some minor but important component. I can't imagine they'll have higher tech than Intel or TSMC. Could it be something related to banking where they need absolute control of the security of the chips? Even that is hard to figure.
They almost get it
just one or two year way http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...green-light-for-a-new-graphics-processor.html apple now have more than 50 graphics chip engineers excluding cpu team
just one or two year way http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...green-light-for-a-new-graphics-processor.html apple now have more than 50 graphics chip engineers excluding cpu team
Oh, but I thought they just stole things instead? This nonsense has got to stop
"Apple Reportedly Buys Into a Chip Fab, Looking to Produce Its Own Chips"
In other news, Microsoft begins looking into buying into a Chip Fab company!
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In other news, Microsoft begins looking into buying into a Chip Fab company!
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I had the same thought. Apple doesn't push even close to enough product to make owning a fab a good idea. It would be like a person buying a fully automatic tire balancer for 20 grand because they want to change their own tires once every 2 years.
"Apple Reportedly Buys Into a Chip Fab, Looking to Produce Its Own Chips"
In other news, Microsoft begins looking into buying into a Chip Fab company!
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Yeah, because once a company isn't Apple most of their products are crap, they're evil, uninnovative and steal all their ideas and concepts off Apple and also mimic them.
Semiaccurate need to make a living too, if you want the details pay for the story. Semiaccurate have had their stories ripped off far too many times in the past so that's the reason they are behind the paywall.
Wow you think apple can just build x86/64 code cpus when intel owns every single patent on it?
No way in hell would intel license it out either
It's really not.
Samsung supply a LOT more than iPhone parts. They were the ones who made the working Retina Display (after LG messed it up). A good chunk of your Mac will contain Samsung parts.
Again, assuming this rumor's validity, APPLE must have done the math. Don't overlook the fact they need massive quantities of chips for their entire iOS product line, and once this is up and running (at least several years probably), they'll be in a better overall competitive position.
Hope this means we get slightly cheaper prices due to direct manufacturing. But no high hopes here
Oh don't be stupid. This is not about lowering price, it's about more control. It's about Apple being able to choose how they want to trade-off power vs performance vs density, rather than being forced to accept what an existing fab offers.
Quality costs. Grow up and stop whining about this. As Louis CK say --- a cellphone is a freaking miracle, and you're upset that this miracle costs $650 (or basically $150 to $250 if you're willing to live like an animal and "settle" for an iPhone4 from eBay)!?
More interesting is the choice of partner. Everyone is guessing the Taiwanese, but my guess (based on nothing much!) would be ST. Their Crolles fab seems to be second only to Intel in their power/performance tradeoff.
Who says they didn't buy the report?
That doesn't mean they're allowed to quote it so that the rest of the internet doesn't have to buy it.