warhorse

maestro64 said:

Intel is going down the slippery slop.

They have their back to the wall with missing out on the mobile market for processor technology, partly because the tied their wagon to the horses called Microsoft. They now think the solution to their problem is to become a commodity FAB house for ARM processors for companies who can not get in toTMSC and Samsung since Apple has those suppliers all wrapped around the Apple wagon wheel.

Yeah this is going to work out well for Intel margins, I wonder how the Intel Investors will feel in a could of years when Intel tells them Margin are suffering because the low cost competitors like TMSC eating their margin lunch. I guaranty the market will said this is the best thing that every happen to Intel get people to buy in and then the big guys dump out before the bad news.

It wasn't due to their tying their wagon to Microsoft at all. Instead, go back to ancient history: 10 whole years ago. Back then the PC, workstation and server/mainframe markets were huge, where all the money and prestige were, and they were dominated by Intel, AMD, Sun and IBM CPUs. (About this RISC versus CISC thing ... most RISC CPUs went into workstations and servers in those days). CPUs that went into smaller devices like mobile phones were much lower profile, earned much less revenue and were left to the likes of Samsung and Qualcomm, who were unable to break into the PC market. Case in point: Qualcomm made SOCs for Blackberry and Nokia devices, and Samsung provided the CPUs for a ton of dumb and feature phones, as did Motorola.

When Apple created the iPhone, they created their own custom design of the small device (low power/low heat) chips that were already going into Blackberry, Windows CE, Java Mobile and similar, so it is not as if they went to Intel asking them to design or manufacture a mobile CPU for them and Intel said no. Why would they, as Intel was already supplying CPUs for Macs by this time, as Apple had long abandoned the PowerPC IBM-Motorola RISC chips created by then?

You could say that Intel was slow to react to the Ax line and to mobile in general. Let's remember: Intel's problem wasn't missing out on the billions that comes from manufacturing mobile SOCs. Instead, it was that the mobile device market caused a huge - though not proportional! - decline in PC sales. Intel's problem isn't that they are not a major iPhone supplier, but rather the existence of the iPhone is why they aren't selling nearly as many PC CPUs as before. Intel had no way of knowing in advance that the iPhone was going to be as big as it was, and they certainly had no idea that the iPhone's success was going to come at the expense of PCs, because mobile phones, feature phones and even early smart phones - which were very common years before the iPhone - did not trigger a drop in PC sales.

Intel's decision to compete with ARM with low power x86 chips was not a bad one, as they provided as good or better performance to all but the very best ARM SOCs. Instead the problem was Intel's strategy. What Intel should have done was court Google to convince them to switch from ARM to x86 for their hardware. This would not have caused conflict with Microsoft, as Microsoft and their manufacturers were already using ARM chips for Windows Mobile hardware, and Microsoft under Ballmer had no desire to unify their mobile and PC platforms in any meaningful way. I believe that Intel could have won over Google by promoting the ability to use the same hardware platform for both Android and Chrome OS - meaning phones, tablets, laptops, TV boxes and whatever other hardware Google had in mind - had Intel made this pitch before Google and their partners standardized mainstream Android architecture with the Jellybean release.

Instead Intel decided to be one of the founding partners and major funders Tizen in order to compete with Android. This decision to do so was ridiculous, no so much because Tizen had no chance of competing with Android - as the original plan was for Tizen to be able to run Linux, web-based and possibly even Android and Microsoft apps - but because Tizen does not require x86 hardware! So though Intel invested years of effort and tens of millions of dollars in the Tizen project, the only Tizen devices on the planet run on Samsung's ARM SOCs, making Intel's position worse off than it would have been had they never spearheaded and helped fund the effort to create Tizen in the first place. So Intel's ambitions in mobile failed for the same reason that Nokia's did: they chose competing with Google and Android over collaborating with them. By the time Intel realized that Tizen was a bust (for everyone but Samsung) and Android would succeed long term and started marketing their x86 chips to Android OEMs as a result, it was too late.

dick applebaum said:

If that is accurate, and there is need/desire to continue to run legacy x86 -- it seems that Apple and Intel could collaborate on  ARM chips to do this efficiently.

While they could in theory, why would they in practice? So iPads and iPhones - mobile devices - could run x86 applications meant for desktops (laptops) and have a thoroughly unsuitable UX/UI as a result? Or so Macs could use Ax processors even though the power/heat limitations that render x86 processors undesirable in mobile do not exist in the MacBook and Mac form factors that have physical cords, much larger batteries and cooling measures? 

Before Apple starts running desktop applications on devices with 5 inch screens, or starts putting mobile SOCs in laptops when far more powerful and versatile desktop SOCs not only exist but cost about the same you are going to have to come up with either a business or technical reason why this can or should be done.

Microsoft and before them Canonical (Ubuntu) have spent years doing work in this area, creating versions of their operating system that would run on both desktop CPUs and mobile SOCs and apps that would work on 5' smartphone screens as well as 50' desktop monitors. But Microsoft and Ubuntu did this because they were desperate for relevance and market share, and in the case of Microsoft attempting to compensate for their mobile app store being a barren wasteland compared to competing app stores by not only iOS but even Google and Amazon. (Our mobile users don't have any mobile apps? Well let them use desktop applications to replace them!) It is similar to Google bringing their Google Play mobile apps to Chrome OS desktop devices, many of whom do not even have touchscreens: a response to plummeting Android tablet sales as well as the fact that Chromebooks never really took off to begin with. 

Desperation often drives a ton of bad tech and business decisions. Apple is not desperate - nowhere close - so trying to mix and match hardware and software between their mobile and desktop lines isn't something that should be on their radar.

JessiReturns said:

Herbivore2 said:

It is doubtful that Intel will get Apple's business readily. TSMC has developed InFO which allows for thinner chip profiles. In addition, TSMC is about to move into the lead with respect to advanced manufacturing on smaller nodes. 

While integrating the modem as part of the SoC allows for certain advantages, TSMC has other advantages over Intel. 

Time will tell, but it is doubtful that Apple moves to Intel foundries anytime soon. 

Fabrication is a very capital intensive business, much like chip design, and the moves on the chess board must be made years in advance of the results-- so Apple has spent years getting away from Samsung.  Getting dependent on TSMC isn't a huge improvement, Apple has made itself independent- both by in-housing chip design and also by making their designs flexible for manufacturing.

So a few years down the line, Intel could win some business from TSMC.  Apple will always keep multiple foundries fighting for its business, and thus they will need to compete on process.

Intel and TSMC both are great at process, though intel is ahead. 

Legacy x86 will never run on ARM chips, except in emulation.  What makes ARM into an ARM chip is its instruction set (ARM stands for "Advanced RISC Machines" and RISC stands for "Reduced Instruction Set Computing". x86 is CISC or "Complex Instruction Set Computing") 

The ARM Instruction set is what gives it superior power-per-watt vs Intel approach of chasing superior-power-at-any-watts.  To reduce power per watt , Intel can improve process-- and they have-- or go to another instruction set -- and if they do the latter it will no longer be x86. 

But take the superior instruction set of an ARM, and the superior SoC Design of Apple and add Intel's process advantages, and that would put Apple even further ahead of everyone else.  Literally nobody would be able to compete, even other ARM licensees (because LG is using off the shelf ARM IP, while Apple is doing better stuff in house.)

Your points 1, 2, 4 and 5 are correct. Your point 3 "though Intel is ahead" is debatable, especially considering that Samsung - who was the first to reach 22, 16, 14 and 10 nm - may indeed be ahead of both. 

Your last statement though is filled with issues. ARM is only superior to x86 because it uses less power and heat, and as a result it is only possible to make x86 processors suitable for the low power/low heat mobile devices if you hobble them. But if it were possible to get good x86 performance within the ARM power/heat restraints, it is what everyone would use. This is the main reason why Apple refuses to even consider ARM for any of its laptops or desktops, even the MacBook Air and Mac Mini, which are not considered workhorses.

LG is not using off-the-shelf ARM IP. LG uses Qualcomm, whose ARM cores are heavily customized just as the Ax are customized. You are free to argue that the Ax series is better if you want, but since there will never be an apples to apples comparison - where both the Ax and Qualcomm 8x processors run the same OS in the same hardware - there is no way to tell. That is why the "nobody would be able to compete" thing is impossible to quantify. First off, it is heavily debatable whether Intel's process is better than Samsung's, and Qualcomm has the option of switching to Samsung if they need/want to. And the debate of whether Qualcomm's custom cores are better than Apple's custom cores is really a debate between the iOS and Android systems that run on a Snapdragon 820 or A10. That debate is a bit more difficult now than it was back when Apple was still using 1 GB of RAM so it was easy to say that Android devices that used 2 and 3 GB of RAM had to do so because the hardware, the OS or both were inferior. But now that Apple used 2 GB of RAM for their last iteration of iPads and using 3 GB of RAM is not out of the question for soon-to-be released iPad Pro and iPhone Plus models (either 7 this year or 7s next year) in order to handle the increased demands that the new releases of iOS require - and also since Apple has silently, subtly decided to not care nearly as much about backwards compatibility for older devices as a result - again it is difficult to state that Apple's Ax chips are going to remain so far ahead of everyone else's.

airmanchairman said:

john.b said:

Still no PIP for the YouTube iPad app?

The delay in adding multitasking to Docs, Sheets and Slides was pure nerdish spite, but P-in-P holdout is for advertising purposes. Implementing it would be tantamount to ad-blocking, cutting of Alphabet's life blood...

Not necessarily nerdish spite. Unlike "the rival Microsoft and Apple suites" which have long had multi-tasking features in the desktop versions that were much easier to port to mobile, Google had no desktop version to reuse or borrow from, just their web version where multitasking is just opening a new browser window and their single task mobile apps. Google never wanted to support multi-tasking because they want their apps and services to use as few resources as possible. The goal for Android, for example, was to be able to run on devices with as little as 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of storage. But Apple adopting multi-tasking for iOS forced their hand. Also since the Docs suite isn't one of their most heavily used apps that gets them a lot of revenue and attention anyway. Were it YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Google Now or even Maps they would have prioritized it gotten it out a lot quicker. But Docs is not among their more heavily used apps on iOS, isn't responsible for much direct revenue and is expensive to maintain and support. So it is no surprise that they took their time with such a major change with one of their second-tier apps.