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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.'"
Remember when Intel took the MacBook air design and turned it into the Ultrabook reference design for its Wintel PC OEMs? Why would Apple not want that to happen again, only faster?
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Sounds like a silly premise. Who says Intel would even want to do it? Why would Intel want to go back into ARM fabrication when they are trying to beat ARM chips with Atom?
People are buying the platform, and it only comes from one vendor. It's not like with Android where you can compare different hardware specs. Apple will produce a single product at a given price point with a given set of hardware specs, and that's what people will buy. Not saying this is a good or bad thing, just that it's a thing.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Intel supplies most of Apple's CPUs, yes?
To give one supplier most or all of your business gives them a HUGE advantage over you.
Just look at what happened to everyone who tied their business to Microsoft or IBM.
This is a business strategy issue - not a tech one.
Personally, I think Apple should take their cash and make their own processors, allowing for their OS to have a firmware component and thereby boosting performance and security.
They make their own chips, and you buy what they make.
Apple isn't going to be able to get Intel to fab their custom chips for them. That isn't Intel's business model.
Intel sells their own CPUs. They don't sell your CPUs.
They just happen to have the best fabs.
Hit submit too soon... replace "greatest" with "best"... I forgot my Apple lingo for a moment.
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Intel's high end fabs are tasked to capacity with their own chips near as I know. They are probably not interested in taking on outside orders for ARM chips.
Now I suppose Apple could switch over to x86, but I doubt they'd be willing to do that given that they own a big stake in ARM. Also at this point Intel doesn't have x86 processors suitable for phones. They may make such a thing in the future but they do not now.
So ya, Intel would be the best option... if they were an option. They have fabs above and beyond anyone else, they spend billions in R&D on it and as such are nearly always a node ahead and have good yields. However, their fabs are for them. Their 22nm fabs are busily cranking out Haswell and Ivy Bridge chips. They are not for rent for cranking out ARM chips, unless something has changed since last I looked.
Going with Intel would have been too expensive and would have been a terrible conflict of interest. Intel would gain early access to all their designs and could use it against them with their atom designs. They were avoiding the same situation they were previously in with Samsung. At first Samsung didn't really compete with Apple but things radically changed and using them as a foundry gave Samsung early access to Apple designs. Intel might not really compete with Apple now in mobile but that is surely going to change as Intel improves their low power chips. This also gives Apple the flexibility to consider migrating more platforms to ARM. So sticking with a company that doesn't venture outside of the foundry business is a safe business decision and Apple can use their leverage to speed up the R&D to make them more competitive with Intel (TSMC recently decided to accelerate migrations to 20nm and 16nm, I wonder who pushed that...).
Is that apple is saving money per chip by going with TSMC. I don't know that its true, but companies always have a strong motivation to attack the bottom line rather than go for quality. Steve Jobs was exceptional because he wanted quality in his products even if they ended up costing more. The exceptional part being that he was good at resisting the lure of cheaper components.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
From the article: "While TSMC wrestles with 28nm and looking to 20nm, Intel is at 22nm now and moving to 14nm for next year. "
TSMC's 28nm process is, in fact, widely considered a big success. Although it didn't ramp up initially, quite as a fast as their customers wanted, that only lasted a few months at start of 2012. Look a bit closer you see changing nodes has problems for all manufactures (even Intel).
20nm is in fact ahead of schedule. The likes of Altera are going to have to wait 2 years before they start producing chips on Intel's 16 nm process. While Apple will have 20nm early next year.
Apple could buy or merge with Intel, and then announce "x86, end of life, ten years. Merry Christmas, AMD." That would be the end of Microsoft, since nobody ever wanted Windows on anything other than x86.
Meanwhile, if Apple used Intel's fab for all of their processors, they could reduce their power consumption at a much faster pace than they're already doing. I'd love to get 20 hours of operation per charge from an iPad.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Apple is planning to have its ARM processors manufactured by TSMC — a move that blogger Andy Patrizio thinks is a colossal mistake.
Why would Intel want to manufacture ARM processors? They might make some money in the short term but the real profits are in owning the intellectual property behind the design. Intel would basically be subsidizing their biggest competitor. It would be akin to asking Microsoft to start their own linux distro or like Apple switching to Android. It makes their product undifferentiated and kills their margins.
Intel always has the option to start making ARM processors in the future but they'd be pretty foolish to do it at this point.
Intel gets high margins on much the x86 line. What on earth makes this douche assume that Intel would be willing to accept Samsung's margins in order to enable Apple to shift even more of the consumer market away from x86???
While you are correct that there are some people who will buy it regardless of what it built with, those days are fading, as many people are fed up with the slow pace of change in the Apple phone arena, and Apple wouldn't want to incur the delay penalty of a switch, when they can accomplish the same goals with their current hardware.
Many pundits are fed up with the "slow" pace of change in the Apple phone arena, because they need new clickbait twice a day. I have yet to hear from anyone who actually owns an iPhone that they're anything of the kind. Most people buy a new phone every 2 years or less frequently. The current iPhone is a significant improvement over the 2-year-old iPhone I have now.
Or are you trying to say that "many people" know or care about things like NFC, fingerprint scanners, or other check-boxable features that most people who don't read Slashdot have never heard of and wouldn't care about if they did? Because the actual numbers of iPhone sales don't seem to bear out that kind of view...
Dan Aris
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We all know that Intel wasn't even an option. They're simply not in the business of fabricating third-party designs, for anyone.
Actually, that's exactly what Intel Custom Foundry does.
Oh they don't. Then why would they manufacture for Apple? Intel's real edge is not processor design, it's manufacturing know-how. Watch PBS's Silicon Valley and understand that Intel is less about designing great processors and more about beating the competition with better processor fabrication. Intel is at least 12 months ahead of everyone and so why would they give that lead up for Apple.
I love the summary.. some random dude (blogger) that writes stories on the Internet has an opinion and thinks mega-billion company is making a mistake.. and this is news on Slashdot nowadays.
How low Slashdot has fallen..
Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.
Intel is inching into the foundry business.
They are *not* making chips for Altera. They have a deal with Altera to make chips at 14nm but Intel doesn't even have a production 14nm process yet. The Cisco deal was only signed in January. No word on when they expect to ship. Their shipping customers (Achronix, Tabula, Netronome) are all startups with limited volumes. Apple needs huge volume. I don't think Intel is ready for that yet.
Intel *does* make custom chips for outside people, contrary to what some people are saying. They sub out spare capacity, especially in older fabs. They just don't make them on their newest foundry processes (the ones that would be actually useful to a company like Apple) for a variety of reasons, the chief one being the newest processes are generally full to capacity. Even if there were some space available it wouldn't be near enough to satisfy Apple's demand for A-series chips. You have to remember, an A-series chip requires on the order of 150,000,000 units in the first year.
Apple has the cash hoard to get into the foundry business if they wanted, but it would take at least a decade to hire engineers and gain the experience necessary to cost-effectively produce stuff like 14nm 3D transistor chips, assuming you can navigate the patent minefield.
The only way such a deal would work is if Apple funded a new Intel foundry to produce Apple chips in some kind of long-term deal, but that would probably require Apple to spend double on the processors to give Intel the fat margins they want to even consider the idea.
I fully agree that in some magical world where this kind of deal happens it would give Apple a permanent advantage in the phone space, as no one would be able to come close to the performance and performance-per-watt of an A7-type chip made on Intel's latest 22, 14, or 10nm process; it would make all other phones look like a joke.
It just isn't going to happen.
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the smaller the fabrication design, the less power used
Ummm, no. The smaller the design the more leakage current you get and the more power is wasted as heat. Who is this idiot that wrote this completely clueless "opinion"? Intel does have a foundry unit, but they don't make lots the size that Apple would need with the fabs that Apple would want to use. The third parties aren't getting lots on 10 million finished parts per quarter at 22nm from Intel. Not unless those third parties are buying Intel branded parts.
I want workstation class ARM processors back. 16 core 4 processor behomith Motherboards to give us on the desk the performance we should have had a decade ago.
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ITW bennett
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This is important; the smaller the fabrication.... the more static power used.
At 22nm, you hit v_sat before threshold anyway. The sweet spot for power is actually about 130nm.
When you say sweet spot, what sort of assumptions are you making about dynamic power consumption? Simply put, the faster your part runs, the higher the dynamic power, and the less static power matters, at least when running full tilt.
Also, for a given process there are often variants, like a high speed high static power variant and a low speed low static power option. Some companies sell parts both ways. For example some of the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP models come in those two variants.
Yes, I'm sure that the (more or less) biggest company in the world, currently being run by the operations guy who helped them reach record-setting levels of profit in the last decade, did not do their homework when evaluating manufacturing partners. Thanks, random blogger guy, I'm sure they'll straighten all their shit out post-haste!
Or maybe, just maybe, the guy who runs one of the most successful companies on the planet and earns more in a year than you and your family could earn in ten lifetimes, actually knows what the fuck he is doing. Just a thought.
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The processor industry is full of players who spend billions of dollars trying to make marginal gains in performance. Spending tons of money on R&D for new processors makes sense if you're selling those processors to lots of other mobile electronics manufacturers, but it doesn't make sense when you're simply hoarding them for your own products. It especially doesn't make sense considering nobody is buying iPhones because of their processor specs, let alone the fact that Apple produces their own chips. Apple would be better off using commodity hardware and spending their money on improving other areas of the user experience. But since I have turned against Apple over the past few years, I'm just fine with watching them make costly mistakes. From what I've been reading, quality control at TSMC has been somewhat questionable and Apple is asking a lot from them to make these new chips with cutting-edge fab processes at a high volume and with minimal defects. I have a feeling this decision will cause trouble for Apple in the future and all of this is a result of Apple trying to punish Samsung in their childish feud.
Ultrabooks are not subnotebooks; they're designed to be as fast, if not moreso, than regular notebooks.
"Ultrabook" is an idiotic category name to begin with. I fail to understand what's so "ultra" about it. Do we have also have "ultratops" on the stationary side of the spectrum? I thought that these were traditionally called "workstations". But it's also possible that I have a brain tumor and my memory is compromised. Just sayin'.
Ezekiel 23:20
ultrabook is only a reality because flash is cheaper now along with a ULV CPU
otherwise its still a thin laptop with long battery life that is only useful for email and similar tasks
Many people are posting as if Intel would be involved in chip design (for example: "Intel doesn't want to make ARMs."). Intel would be acting only as a foundry: Apple does the design work, sends Intel a set of files specifying mask geometry; Intel makes masks and fabricates the chips.
The questions thus become, who has good enough technology and who is a reliable supplier? If Apple doesn't need the finest tech that only Intel can provide, then using Intel isn't necessary.
TSMC having production capacity limits can be a problem, and it's likely to have delayed deliveries in a crunch. But foundry is their only business, not producing is not an option. Intel on the other hand, can decide "we need all foundries for internal use. Make your lifetime orders now; no new business will be accepted." 33 years ago (the only information I have, from a then-Reticon employee) was that this was a substantial risk in dealing with Intel as a fab.
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Isn't it because they all come from factories located in Nebula M78?
They have an ARM license and I think they tested a 28nm SOI ARM design a while back. They may not be as advanced as Intel, but I don't think they are over capacity either.
You should think that through a little bit more. It would take less than 10 years for MS to covert all their apps to non-x86 platforms (the kernel and Office already run on RT machines). If x86 dies Microsoft can drop all legacy support, which is the source of most of MS' problems (excluding Metro) and gets to resell a new license for every piece of software to everyone. MS will come out with a stronger product line and more cash. Any companies complaining about the switch and lack of backward support will be pointed towards Intel/Apple for killing x86. Microsoft gets off free and Intel/Apple become the bad guys in corporations' eyes.
Merry Christmas AMD indeed, provided they could survive the ten years needed to become the dominant x86 manufacturer. Meanwhile, you could expect x86 front ends to pop up on fundamentally different hardware, even if it's inefficient. This move might increase the adoption of non-x86 platforms in the office, and get Microsoft to write for them as well (having a fully operable Office would be enough for a lot of businesses), but AMD would be stronger than they are now.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It would take less than 10 years for MS to covert all their apps to non-x86 platforms
Been there, done that, failed miserably. Remember Windows NT for SPARC, Alpha, etc, etc? Remember all the people not buying it?
MS is all about the legacy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Intel abominates ARM. They will do anything for it to die. Intel's marketing dept will not let them fab any ARM. Thats why they sold their ARM division.
I am sure that Intel offered Apple to use their x86 platform on the iPhone and iPad, but for some reason (energy efficiency, price, etc) they stuck with ARM.
Also it seems Apple is doing really well with ARM business, so I don't think they plan to make the switch anytime soon.
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation) is a Taiwanese company, not Chinese. Unless you are going by Beijing's claim that Taiwan is a part of China, but even then, the first statement doesn't make sense.
Apple has two major 20nm/14nm FinFET Fab giants to choose from without taking it in the rear from Intel, while dictating their designs. Sorry, but Intel will never get Apple's embedded space manufacturing.
You're forgetting laptops like the IBM Thinkpad X-series, which was a high-end, high-performance, compact laptop that you used to have to pay dearly for. Those are what Ultrabooks were before they were called Ultrabooks.
Arguably this honour goes to ARM
Uhm, try again...
OK, I'll try again...
ARM has shipped over 30 billion processors with a current annual rate of 5 billon per year. Only 3.5 billion PCs have ever been sold and the current rate is less than 0.5 billon per year. So, yes, I believe it is arguable that the ARM ISA has sold more than x86.
NT was never publicly available on the SPARC. Intergraph toyed w/ the idea some, but then dropped it, and went whole Wintel. NT debuted with the MIPS and Alpha, and added PPC later. And then dropped MIPS, PPC and Alpha, in that order.