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Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

reuters.com

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Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#61

Post by LoganDark »

aurareturn wrote: post #48
whynotminot wrote: post #25

Big deal, smart for all parties, really. Apple standards will make Intel step up and become a better foundry partner. Apple will gain increasingly needed diversification. US supply chain gets a boost. Should be fine for TSMC in the short to medium term. Apple not going to risk actual mainline iPhone SoC on Intel any time soon, so lion share of TSMC Apple revenue will be fine.

The biggest reason to do this is because TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Since AI chips have far bigger margins than most Apple chips, Apple will get outbid by companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. Nvidia already became TSMC's biggest customer last year. Every TSMC advanced node from N5 to N2 is fully booked and running at max capacity. It's not really realistic to make Mac, Watch,…

I find it ironic that Apple did the whole silicon thing to get away from Intel and now they are reportedly crawling back to Intel? I hope M6 and beyond continue to be competitive for inference.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#62

Post by regexorcist »

01100011 wrote: post #16

> The Journal report said that the U.S. government, which became Intel's largest shareholder last year under a deal with its CEO Lip-Bu Tan, played a major role in bringing Apple to the negotiating table. Ah, so this wasn't a decision Apple freely made based on technical merits. Instead it sounds more like big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme. My guess, Apple drags their feet for a couple years and ba…

There are many recent examples of market manipulation, but this isn't one of them. Digital sovereignty is being pushed in the EU too, and it's a good thing.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#63

Post by aurareturn »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #56
aurareturn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason to do this is because TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Since AI chips have far bigger margins than most Apple chips, Apple will get outbid by companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. Nvidia already became TSMC's biggest customer last year. Every TSMC advanced node from N5 to N2 is fully booked and running at max capacity. It's not really realistic to make Mac, Watch,…

Apple arguably are making AI workstations that can do inference and training by their Mac Studio and Macbook Pros to a lesser extent. The M6 generation is going to be interesting and before the memory pricing going up their products were competitive to the rest of the industry. Intel is still working with small and smaller process nodes.

Yes, I want Apple to focus on Mac inference. It could be the return of laptops/desktops as a major revenue source for Apple. Macs have been ~10% of Apple's revenue for the last 10 years or so. I'd love to see Macs get up to 20-30%.

I do expect personal AI machines to take off in a few years once local models and local hardware hit an inflection point. M5 Max is a major improvement for local inference due to the added matmul accelerators, but the RAM capacity and bandwidth bottleneck is huge.

That said, enterprise AI chips will still take the cake in terms of margins.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#64

Post by 01100011 »

saltcured wrote: post #39
01100011 wrote: post #16

> The Journal report said that the U.S. government, which became Intel's largest shareholder last year under a deal with its CEO Lip-Bu Tan, played a major role in bringing Apple to the negotiating table. Ah, so this wasn't a decision Apple freely made based on technical merits. Instead it sounds more like big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme. My guess, Apple drags their feet for a couple years and ba…

This is more my imagining a book plot than any real insight, but... This wouldn't be Apple's first rodeo with Intel. They know how prior partnerships soured. Could a sufficiently powerful shareholder, like the US government, help mitigate Apple's concerns about the outcome of a new partnership? I.e. that Intel would be pressured to honor certain strategic obligations, even if the leadership at Intel isn't so keen?

How can the USG improve the competitiveness of INTC's process nodes with political pressure?

Was the concern in the past that Intel wasn't honoring strategic obligations or was it that Apple realized their tech sucked and TSMC was the only viable path to deliver world-leading products?

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#65

Post by 01100011 »

coevcan wrote: post #47
01100011 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did the USG need to get involved to bring AAPL to the table? Sure, supply chain redundancy is good, but that wasn't enough to get AAPL interested before.

Intel chip fab facility in Arizona came online recently, probably has something to do with it, the manufacturing capability didn't exist before.

So did TSMC's? And Samsung has a Texas fab.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#66

Post by Melatonic »

GeekyBear wrote: post #53
whynotminot wrote: post #25

Big deal, smart for all parties, really. Apple standards will make Intel step up and become a better foundry partner. Apple will gain increasingly needed diversification. US supply chain gets a boost. Should be fine for TSMC in the short to medium term. Apple not going to risk actual mainline iPhone SoC on Intel any time soon, so lion share of TSMC Apple revenue will be fine.

This is the third year in a row that Apple's most advanced chips have used a version of TSMC's 3nm node, with a transition to a more advanced node due in the next generation. Intel would only need to be on par with TSMC's older 3nm node to Fab Apple's entry level SOCs.

Intel just bought a ton of ASML's most advanced machines (way more than TSMC) so theoretically they should be able to manufacture stuff on an equivalent node or better. And given the kind of performance and battery life we have seen from their latest chips they definitely seem to be back in the game

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#68

Post by 01100011 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #33
tester756 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme. What's wrong with US gov caring about supply chain and manufacturing capability of the most needed technology right there - on American soil? It is in US' interest to be able to produce such complex tech locally

Yes, it's called industrial policy and it can work very well.

Yes and it can also reduce competitive forces which were driving Intel to innovate. The goal of a robust supply chain is not aligned with the goal of technical supremacy. Sure, the US did achieve technical supremacy in the past with government intervention and assistance, but the world was much different then. Now the US has to compete with East Asian innovation.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#69

Post by SoKamil »

LoganDark wrote: post #61
aurareturn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason to do this is because TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Since AI chips have far bigger margins than most Apple chips, Apple will get outbid by companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. Nvidia already became TSMC's biggest customer last year. Every TSMC advanced node from N5 to N2 is fully booked and running at max capacity. It's not really realistic to make Mac, Watch,…

I find it ironic that Apple did the whole silicon thing to get away from Intel and now they are reportedly crawling back to Intel? I hope M6 and beyond continue to be competitive for inference.

This is about FABs and not chip designs. Imagine a parallel universe where Apple was sourcing AMD chips (they actually did for graphic cards) and then went to TSMC to whom AMD is also a customer.

Intel is both at the same time, AMD and TSMC.

Re: Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

#70

Post by Melatonic »

saltcured wrote: post #35
wtallis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we make the not-particularly-reasonable assumption that Apple would want to own a fab, and the wildly unreasonable assumption that they would accept any outside customers for the fab: building a fab business from scratch to something competitive would take on the order of a decade or more even for a company with Apple's resources. And if Apple bought somebody else's fab business, it seems most likely that it…

Yes, I suppose I was imagining the weird transition like AMD did when they split off Global Foundries. Imagine the remaining Intel being a chip designer like AMD. For someone of my age, it seems both incomprehensible and somehow inevitable. Crazy leadership choices seem to be happening so often in recent years. Honestly, I found it hard to understand why they abandoned RAM and solid state memory fab sectors too. With…

They already spun off Intel vs Intel Foundry into separate companies awhile back

Intel was in ram and solid state for a bit but didnt stick with it. Optane was a huge flop and they use different manufacturing techniques vs CPUs. Plus Micron is one of the biggest dram manufacturers and US based.

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