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Opinion: Apple Should Have Gone With Intel Instead of TSMC
itwbennett writes "Apple is planning to have its ARM processors manufactured by TSMC — a move that blogger Andy Patrizio thinks is a colossal mistake. Not only is TSMC already over-extended and having trouble making deadlines. But Intel was clearly the better choice: 'Intel may be struggling in mobility with the Atom processors, but Intel does yields and manufacturing process migration better than anyone,' says Patrizio. 'While TSMC wrestles with 28nm and looking to 20nm, Intel is at 22nm now and moving to 14nm for next year. This is important; the smaller the fabrication design, the less power used.'"
The silliest premise is that some blogger knows more about the issues with different chip fabs than Apple does. For that blogger to say Apple made a mistake, before we've seen any results from the deal? Stupid. Simply click bait.
Ultrabooks have been around since the 90's. only thing that changed is that intel is now making decent ultra low voltage CPU's and they use flash memory instead of HDD. otherwise Sony used to make some PHB happy laptops in 2000 and 2001 that were thin. PHB's loved them for travel
Apple nor anyone else wants to pay Intel enough to go back to fabbing arm cpu's. they made some top of the line arm's back in the day, but the real money in arm wasn't top end but the bottom end and they got better things to do with their fabs.
Do you seriously think Apple is not fronting the cash for TSMC's upgraded fabs? Paying cash up front to suppliers so that it can get first access to the newest parts is one of Apple's key strategies and it's the reason Tim Cook got to be the CEO.
If you ask me, Apple either knows something we don't about TSMC, or it wants to build TSMC up as a strategic move to counter Samsung, Qualcomm, Intel, and other companies.