
Intel to fab ARM chips for Apple? It's possible... - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/05/intel-to-fab-arm-chips-for-apple-its-possible.ars
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bryanallen22
It's worth noting that, until June 2006, Intel made their own ARM processors
before selling the business to Marvell. They saw the conflict of interest
between their ARM lines and their forthcoming Atom lines, and threw their
weight behind the architecture that they controlled. ARM chips are also much
less expensive than Intel is used to charging for it's silicon -- they wanted
to keep their costly fabs churning on high margins products.

This would effectively be a retreat from those ideals, and reduce them back to
the role of another commoditized supplier of ARM processors -- something they
had hoped to avoid by pushing x86 in the low power market.

Porting processors between fabs is not easy. When Marvell made this transition
in reverse, by buying the XScale ARM business from Intel, it took a long time
to move from Intel's fab process to TSMC.

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gonzo
Intel acquired StrongARM from Digital (DEC) in 1997 (after DEC sued Intel over
Pentium). Intel turned StrongARM into Xscale.

You are correct that Intel sold part of their Xscale business to Marvell, but
they also kept the Xscale storage processors.

<http://edc.intel.com/Platforms/Previous/Processors/IOP/>

All the generations of XScale are 32-bit ARMv5TE processors (ARMv5TE ISA
without the FP instructions) manufactured with a 0.18 µm or 0.13 µm (as in
IXP43x parts) process.

I think the reason for Intel selling off most of the Xscale business to
Marvell is that Marvell has an architecture license, and ARM, Ltd probably
didn't want to sell one to Intel.

Apple helped develop ARM, so it likely has a less expensive license than
anyone else.

Given that Intel knows how to get an ARM5 into 0.13, getting a theoretic A6
into its 0.22 process is likely straight-forward.

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r00fus
Wait 0.13 microns = 130nm. Also ARMv5?

Even the 3GS is a cortex A8 which is built on a 45nm core.

From what you're sayin intel is very far behind in ARM technology.

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gonzo
sorry. got microns an nm mixed up.

------
gonzo
Intel has a 22nm process coming online this year. I doubt the A4 or A5 are
ported to this, but an A6 could be designed for the Intel 22nm process.

Apple could probably run the A5 @ 1.25GHz in intel's 34nm process (were it to
port same.)

So, more features, less expensive parts, less power consumption per GHz. I see
Intel as a definite possibility, especially if Apple can exclude other
competitive ARM SoCs from Intel's process.

Intel: "You can't have ARM, but would you like an Atom, sir?"

Intel/Micron also have 20nm flash now. Densities are about to scale in mobile
storage as well.

