It's a bit of an unfair statement but I do see where he's coming from. Apple make consumer phones and laptops, professional workstations, wearables, headphones, and TV/Home products. We've yet to see an M series chip for products in any of the following fields:
Cloud Computing, Computer Vision, Data Center Solutions, Edge Computing, High Performance Computing, IT Infrastructure, Network Connectivity, Robotics, Security, Broadcasting, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Government & Public Sector, Health & Life Sciences, Hospitality & Restaurants, Industrial, Manufacturing, Retail, Smart Cities, Transportation.
Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm make devices or design IP for every single one of those sectors. Apples' portfolio is streamlined to just "lifestyle sectors"; stuff people directly interact with in their every day lives. How can you call them the number one chip maker when they don't compete in any of those markets, and even in the one they do they're only superior in performance per watt; not sheer performance benchmarks? Until we start seeing M2 chips in everything from server racks and satellites, I'm inclined to side with Gelsinger on this one.
> How can you call them the number one chip maker when they don't compete in any of those markets,
Because they produce north of 300 million SoCs every year. They may not end up the number one chipmaker every single year but they're in the top ten and depending on other companies' demand vs Apple's demand may end up number one.
If we're talking about manufacturing volume as the sole definition for "number one chip maker", then the idea that Apple might be first is frankly laughable. If we discounted pure foundries (TSMC, UMC, Global Foundries) they'd struggle to scrape top 5 at the best of times. Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and the like work in the range of billions, or near enough. Currently Intel has 76.7% of the laptop chip market share alone; that's before you start considering their server, edge, and network markets. If we start including trailing edge chips, from the likes of Texas Instruments, Micron, Broadcom, etcetera, then Apple would be a small drop in the pond. Even if Apple ate up the entire consumer market, they'd still struggle to compete with the rest of the industry on volume.
I don't think people appreciate the obscene number of leading edge chips that go into the industrial sectors. I've seen more chips go into a single Industry 4.0 factory than I have to an entire states Micro Center inventory.
Number one in performance / watt? maybe? sales? Well no. According to the web[1] total chip sales in 2022 excluding arm amount to 374 million units. Server chips being 36.1 million units. Apple's biggest quarter in 2022 was 7 million macs in Q4[2].
For anyone curious, iPhones ship 234 million a year, Watch around 60 million, iPad another 20 million. Not sure about Apple TV but let's assume that's 0. That's over 300 million CPUs a year.
I doubt the total chip number for the industry though - Intel alone ships ~100M. But it's clear Apple is very likely the largest manufacturer of CPUs.
* Correction: MediaTek shipped 350M units in 2020 and Qualcomm shipped 319M (due to the Trump embargo on China). So Apple is up there competing with manufacturers that sell their chips to anyone who will buy, but it may not necessarily be the largest.
Yeah. How you count things is very subjective to where you draw the line. As for margins it's hard to say because Apple doesn't sell chips independently so their profit margin on a chip is withdrawn from however they want to distribute the profit margins for the entire product and Apple does not provide a breakout a sufficient level of granularity into the financials to understand that.
It's not surprising, anyone who sells iPhones is going to need a lot of chips. Gelsinger wasn't half wrong anyways - outside the consumer hardware market Apple is a no-show.
Indeed, to an almost comical extent. I worked at a Mac-only shop that spent 50+ engineering hours per-month debugging the Darwin runtime. Our product didn't ship to Mac either, so we were basically fanagling a Win32 + Linux server toolchain to work on a platform we didn't support.
Tech companies count as consumers, and many consume the Apple product even if it's to their detriment.
> By 2021, this migration had become a trend. IDC claimed macOS device use across US enterprises reached 23% while iPhones accounted for 49% of business smartphones and iPads accounted for most tablets used in the workplace.
All I know that huge numbers of employees of both large and small companies regularly use company provided Macs and Iphones for work. Are you actually disputing that? Really?
If AMD is a chip maker then so is Apple by the same metrics.
So, pick those metrics, they're certainly pushing large volumes, they're pushing some of the highest performance and some of the most efficient CPUs available.
So, they're #1 in power efficiency, #1 in fanless performance, #1 in Tablets, #1 in Fanless computers, #1 in Mini computers.
If you outsource chip creation, then you are chip designer, arent you?
>Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or fab) to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclusively, located in the United States, China, and Taiwan
So if we're talking about high-end chips Intel and Samsung are both designers and manufactuerers? And Samsung seems to have mostly abandoned Exynos and is using Qualcomms SoC now. So that only leaves Intel..
Cloud Computing, Computer Vision, Data Center Solutions, Edge Computing, High Performance Computing, IT Infrastructure, Network Connectivity, Robotics, Security, Broadcasting, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Government & Public Sector, Health & Life Sciences, Hospitality & Restaurants, Industrial, Manufacturing, Retail, Smart Cities, Transportation.
Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm make devices or design IP for every single one of those sectors. Apples' portfolio is streamlined to just "lifestyle sectors"; stuff people directly interact with in their every day lives. How can you call them the number one chip maker when they don't compete in any of those markets, and even in the one they do they're only superior in performance per watt; not sheer performance benchmarks? Until we start seeing M2 chips in everything from server racks and satellites, I'm inclined to side with Gelsinger on this one.