Intel Expresses Interest in Making Foundry Deals to Produce Custom Chips

[MattInOz]

Obviously this would take some time to develop (years?), but this is potentially fantastic news for Apple. In the current context, I'm sure almost everyone would agree that a custom ULV Sandy Bridge chip stripped of its graphics core, clocked a bit higher, and coupled with a 3rd-party alternative would make a new line of MBA's unbeatable.

But moving forward, hopefully Apple can find ways to streamline its own processes while stripping away general-purpose silicon from Intel parts. If so, we could see smaller dies, lower power consumption, and higher clock speeds for Machines running Mac OSX.

The downside is that this could really hurt the Hackintosh community. People will make it work, but it will be less convenient than it is now.

Not sure it would be worth Apple's while to do this directly, but the interesting possiblity would be nVidia they don't have their own fabs anyways. So why not take their GPU cores and IO silicon team it with a couple of sandy bridge CPU cores and produce a single chip x86 SoC.

nVidia would be able to push them for lots of other uses basically anywhere they are using Ion Platform now. So they have a much bigger market to drive a move here. I'm sure they could maybe Talk Apple into pre-buying all the top bins for the next macbooks, teaming them with dedicated GPU in the upper end.

 

[Analog Kid]

Anybody who's worked with Intel knows to steer well clear of anything that isn't part of their bread and butter business. Intel starts floating these ideas when they have excess capacity, or there's a dip in CPU demand, and then act like they've never seen you before in their lives when they have a better use for their line.

Apple might have the clout and legal team to get a short term deal signed for a generation of devices, but I'm sure even they are smart enough not to take this seriously. If Apple can affect the standard offerings coming out of Intel, that's great. Tapping capacity for a boutique chip that isn't on Intel's roadmap? Foolish.

 

[jonnysods]

Interesting development...

Intel seem very threatened by ARM.

 

[theosib]

ARM on 22nm FinFET

A Cortex-A9 on Intel's new 22nm FinFET technology would be mind-blowing.

 

[AppleScruff1]

Perhaps Intel is actually looking at adapting to the future market? Why does it have to be fear? Why not good business sense? The entire industry is at the begging stages of the next major change. Why not be part of it instead of getting left behind?

 

[jacksonkeller]

Not sure it would be worth Apple's while to do this directly, but the interesting possiblity would be nVidia they don't have their own fabs anyways. So why not take their GPU cores and IO silicon team it with a couple of sandy bridge CPU cores and produce a single chip x86 SoC.

nVidia would be able to push them for lots of other uses basically anywhere they are using Ion Platform now. So they have a much bigger market to drive a move here. I'm sure they could maybe Talk Apple into pre-buying all the top bins for the next macbooks, teaming them with dedicated GPU in the upper end.

Doubt Intel wound agree to license out their technology like that. Nice idea though.

 

[Hellhammer]

needs to lose it's Samsung connection, and IT WILL HAPPEN, Samsung copied products, and payback is a bitch,especially feigning interest in AMOLED screens, and going ELSEWHERE, for your needs, my friend, SJ is very cunning,DON'T, ever count him out of the picture

Everyone copies from each other, that is the rule #1 in the industry. Steve said it himself: "Good artists copy, Great artists steal". It's simply impossible to not to copy something. We could say that every laptop is copying Osbourne 1, which was the first commercially available laptop. Apple, Dell, HP etc have copied the concept of a laptop from that. Sure, they are a lot different but the basic idea is the same and it has been copied by many others.

The bottom line, competition could not exist if copying was prohibited.

Samsung is much more than just a laptop OEM. They make LCDs, OLEDs, flash NANDs, hard drives etc. Apple would not change the supplier just because Samsung is slightly copying their products.

 

[caspersoong]

AMOLED is the future. The question is when it will replace LCD, not if. Right now, Samsung has demonstrated itself as a clear leader in AMOLED displays, at least in mobile form factor sizes.

Seems to contradict Apple being the one defining the future such as the mouse, etc.

 

[bigwig]

Intel is DOA for the Embedded space. Let them waste several billion attempting to compete against ARM licensing solutions. They won't win.

ARM is mostly concentrated in handsets. The big Kahuna in embedded is MIPS.

 

[AidenShaw]

Seems to contradict Apple being the one defining the future such as the mouse, etc.

You mean that pointing device which was invented 13 years before Apple was formed, and 21 years before the MacIntosh?

ARM is mostly concentrated in handsets. The big Kahuna in embedded is MIPS.

Every new Imac has a MIPS CPU embedded in it (probably a dual-core 64-bit MIPS processor, but I haven't found the spec sheet that describes the CPU).