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Apple Eyes Intel and Samsung as Backup US Chipmakers

Will Co said:
In the UK, the BBC is today running an article on it's News website explaining wether people should use AI to help them make a decision about elections. Short answer, and obviously, "Nope". But it shows how concerned "the establishment" is that AI might be used to sway an election.

Ironically, the sort of people who are likely to consult AI before anything else are precisely the sort of people who will not read the BBC News website. But that's another story.
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It's no different that using Google and clicking the top links.
 
Justin Cymbal said:
I’m surprised that there is so much more demand for the Studio over the Mac Pro
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The 2023 Mac Pro cost $3000 more than a Studio Ultra and the only thing it really offered was PCIe slots.

The appeal of Apple Silicon for AI models is the relatively large amount of unified memory shared between the integrated CPU, GPU and NPU without the bottleneck you'd get between main RAM and VRAM on a PCIe GPU/NPU. So even if you did have drivers for PCIe GPUs in a Mac Pro, using dGPUs would take away the Apple Silicon advantage & you might as well just get a generic PC workstation with more PCIe lanes & bandwidth.

Sure, you can use the Pro's PCIe slots to add lots of local SSD storage, but you can get a lot of TB5-to-M.2 enclosures for $3000.

The 2023 Mac Pro was really for people who relied on specialist I/O cards for video and audio production & gave them a couple more years to move to Thunderbolt-based workflows.
 
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DBZmusicboy01 said:
AI is the biggest abomination to happen to mankind in the past 100 years 😤
It has destroyed the entire technological industry 💔 for many reasons and even YouTube is being flooded with many AI videos pretending to be real videos and lots of slop.

I don’t think there will be a Mac Mini refresh this year due to the huge shortage of chips. I think intel would be a great partner once again for the low end devices. But I do worry about it being on iPhone Pros and M series Mac Mini’s / Books
Mac Mini Neo would be fantastic for intel 👌🏻
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I disagree - social media is the biggest abomination to happen to mankind in the past 100 years - it's practically destroyed western democracy and eduction.
 
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Just use the TeraFab....

For those who don't know thats a fab maybe being built in Austin by Intel and Tesla for AI robotics chips. It may or may not happen in the next 5-20 years. Timelines are not Telsas strong suit.
 
Corefile said:
It's no different that using Google and clicking the top links.
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It’s at least a little different in that you’re actually clicking and reading some different things.

There’s at least some portion of an evaluation process going on there that simply does not happen when the slop machine just gives you “an answer”.

It’s still not great, don’t get me wrong.
 
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this has been rumored for what, 6 months already? and now Gurman chimes in and Intel stock pops ...
Apple has been building up TSMC and became massively dependent on them, now diversifying is only the logical next step. It remains to be seen if Intel can actually deliver, performance and yield that is.
 
HaHaRich! said:
Yup! Take incredibly clean sand, pour it into a tube and heat it until it melts. Then take hot molten silica sand and spin it around. The gunk in the sand gets spread to the outer edges, leaving the pure silicon closer to the center. Slice the tube to get round disks, that’s your wafer. Chop it up into squares, discard what you can’t sell, but you get “grades” of quality, almost like beef; again, purest stuff in the center is worth more, with some impurities in the middle ring, and hopefully most of the low quality stuff on the other edges.
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Er, are you perhaps thinking of Czochralski crystal growth? Silicon IC wafers generally aren’t diced until very late in device fabrication, and a significant radial impurity gradient would be intolerable.
 
Will Co said:
If memory serves, it's because they are sliced or "pared" off a cylinder of silicon substrate, the substrate itself being cylindrical because the manufacturing process is one that involves spinning. I can't remember why, but I think probably to reduce waste and improve uniformity.
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There are 4 main reasons single-crystal silicon boules are spun while being drawn:
1. Uniform Dopant Distribution
2. Controlling Melt Temperature & Homogeneity
3. Managing Oxygen Levels
4. Maintaining Cylindrical Shape & Diameter
5. Reducing Crystal Defects

"The gunk in the sand gets spread to the outer edges, leaving the pure silicon closer to the center," is not one of the reasons. The rotational speed is not that high. The rotational speeds are typically between 10 and 20 revolutions per minute (RPM).
 
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Neither Intel nor Samsung can reliably provide the kind of production and scale that TSMC offers, so it's not clear how much, if anything, will come out of the discussions. Apple has already worked with TSMC to help expand its plant in Phoenix, which is now producing a limited number of chips for Apple and expects to make 100 million chips for the company in 2026.
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Setting aside whether this is still true or not, the problem Apple is going to face is competing for limited Wafer Capacity (as well as increased wafer costs) in the midst of tremendous datacenter demand. TSMC needs competent competition otherwise component prices will just continue to rise and/or it will become harder to get wafer allocation.

Let's see what happens with Intel 18A-P and Intel 14A.
 
gmnygts said:
There are 4 main reasons single-crystal silicon boules are spun while being drawn:
1. Uniform Dopant Distribution
2. Controlling Melt Temperature & Homogeneity
3. Managing Oxygen Levels
4. Maintaining Cylindrical Shape & Diameter
5. Reducing Crystal Defects

"The gunk in the sand gets spread to the outer edges, leaving the pure silicon closer to the center," is not one of the reasons. The rotational speed is not that high. The rotational speeds are typically between 10 and 20 revolutions per minute (RPM).
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Very interesting, and thanks, but I think you might be quoting the wrong person when you mentioned "the gunk..."
 
turbineseaplane said:
It’s at least a little different in that you’re actually clicking and reading some different things.

There’s at least some portion of an evaluation process going on there that simply does not happen when the slop machine just gives you “an answer”.

It’s still not great, don’t get me wrong.
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Good point. Discernment is what is lacking. I agree with you that someone is more likely to attempt to discern a truth from clicking around a few search page results than just swallowing whole the dose of slop they're given by AI.
 
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Will Co said:
Good point. Discernment is what is lacking. I agree with you that someone is more likely to attempt to discern a truth from clicking around a few search page results than just swallowing whole the dose of slop they're given by AI.
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I'm already seeing this all over ... people are saying things like "XYZ-AI said this"

..and that's the end of it.

Who knows where that came from, what any kind of source or context might be ... just "an answer".

The ramifications of this are exceptionally profound and potentially very dangerous.
 
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Jonas Danielsson said:
Oh no we don’t want to go back to intel x86 and they not even supported anymore what else should intel make a n-processor when they making theirs old junk x86 indent really get this
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You're aware that they are just supposed to manufacture their chips?? Where did anyone say that Apple will go back to Intel chips??
 
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