[tw04]

And if a company with as much experience and expertise as Intel misses their ship dates, what on earth makes Apple think they can do better?

I could see an argument for cutting cost by eliminating the margin that Intel dictates... but even that assumes that you can find a third party to manufacture the chips at a rate that is low enough to both cover the IP Intel has in their chips, and the manufacturing cost itself.

[Tloewald]

Well, first of all Apple could do it and fail. They're done that before. They're confident/arrogant/audacious enough to try things that they can't pull off.

Also, they could take a two-pronged approach -- cherry-pick talent from Intel, nVidia, etc. and offer them the opportunity to leapfrog baggage from the past. How much of the difficulty of moving the x86 platform forward is a result of the ludicrous amount of cruft? Grabbing a few of the smartest people and narrowing your focus to an easier problem gets you a long way.

Apple has managed to outpace the entire industry (including Intel) with its customized ARM cores (getting to 64-bit over a year ahead of everyone, and take a look at benchmarks between Apple's Ax CPUs and rivals usually running at far higher clocks with more RAM and sucking more power), and it got there by cherry-picking talent, omitting stuff it didn't need, focusing on design, and treating fabs as a commodity.

Looks like interesting times ahead.

[spiralpolitik]

Broadwell slipped by several months meaning that Apple couldn't do their traditional pre Holiday refresh in 2014. I believe the Skylake chipsets that would allow Apple to switch to using USB-C for the Pros aren't available until next quarter meaning it's possible that Apple could miss another fall refresh.

Given that the holiday quarter is Apples best season you can probably make bets that they are at least exploring their options.

[ceejayoz]

> And if a company with as much experience and expertise as Intel misses their ship dates, what on earth makes Apple think they can do better?

Intel has other clients who may be just as noisy about their own ship dates. They make custom processors for AWS, as an example. An Apple-owned subsidiary/division would have Apple as its sole priority.

[mtgx]

I don't think Intel sees anyone on the PC space as a major threat, so they aren't in a hurry to make everything perfect all the time.

[dlp211]

Except their bottom line. Anyone remember the cost to Intel for their faulty FPU in the P5?

[gherkin0]

> Except their bottom line. Anyone remember the cost to Intel for their faulty FPU in the P5?

I don't think that's as big of an issue with modern processors:

https://wiki.debian.org/Microcode:

> Processors from Intel and AMD may need updates to their microcode to operate correctly. These updates fix bugs/errata that can cause anything from incorrect processing, to code and data corruption, and system lockups.

[gsnedders]

Oh, there's still plenty of things beneath that level that can go wrong. Just look at Intel disabling HTM (through microcode, admittedly, but disabling a whole feature isn't fixing it to operate correctly) in Haswell/early Broadwell.

[bgibson]

I was thinking that too. But I wonder if Apple sees an opportunity to become the Intel of ARM chips - mobile and desktop, at least.

[wolfgke]

I don't believe that Apple has a tendency to sell their chips to other companies.

[benihana]

>And if a company with as much experience and expertise as Intel misses their ship dates, what on earth makes Apple think they can do better?

A decade of shipping millions of products that depend on very complicated supply chains on time and to great profit?

[dlp211]

Yes, because Intel doesn't do the same thing. /s

Granted, Intel's supply chains probably aren't nearly as difficult as Apple's, but the supply chain is probably the least difficult part of shipping the next generation of a chip.

[saosebastiao]

I wouldn't say that. From a materials and complexity standpoint, Apple has a much more difficult supply chain. But from a capital and planning standpoint, Intel has one of the most difficult supply chains out there. Every year they start building fabs that won't produce a single production chip for another 3 years, while planning on stuffing it full of capital intensive technology that isn't technologically feasible yet and might not even work. Practically speaking, Intel has to accurately forecast what Apple's, Oracle's, HP's, and Dell's sales are going to be in 5 years, a good 3 years before those companies even start their strategic and capital plans. A five year forecast for a yearly financial report at Apple might take a couple of economists a week to ballpark, whereas at Intel they probably have teams of economists, statisticians, etc. working around the year to improve their sales forecasts on horizons ranging from a week to a decade.

[kemiller]

I think the point is that Apple's in the same league or better, and it doesn't have to compete with Intel in a fair fight. Intel has to work with every x86 program ever made (more or less) and in dozens of different environments. Apple only has to optimize its own stuff, and can change its mind on a whim.