

Intel in talks with Apple to build iPhone processors - ikono
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/30/intel-apple-samsung-chips/

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phaet0n
Summary: \- Intel fabs ARM cores for iPhone \- Apple agrees to x86 for iPad

This is an absolutely crucial moment for Intel and I'd love to be a fly on the
wall on these negotiations. The nuances of the decision making must be
absolutely fascinating.

Intel, I feel is making the wrong bet going all-in on mobile. This is somewhat
like a "part two" of the Nokia collaboration on MeeGo except they're probably
looking for more assurances from Apple.

The problem for Intel is one the one hand their process advantage is slipping
(albeit slowly) and third-party fabs are "good enough" processes for mobile,
and on the other hand everybody else is going ARM for cloud computing hoping
to beat Intel on price.

Apple on the other hand has to consider the pain and cost of another "Rosetta"
process for iPad, but it should be much easier since app delivery is
constrained to their app store.

Apple definitely has the upper hand in negotiations, but that depends on how
constrained they are on the supply side. I'm sure that Tim Cook would have
planned accordingly, the question is how good a deal can they wring out of
Intel instead of moving to TSMC, or if they get their act together GloFo.

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ikono
What do you mean by Intel is making the wrong bet by going all-in on mobile?
By mobile are you talking about smartphone/tablet or laptop? What would you do
instead?

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phaet0n
I feel Intel is going to make the mistake of taking their datacenter advantage
for granted. They should be doing everything to cement that advantage instead
of an unnecessary focus on mobile, by which I mean the present ARM space of
smartphone/tablet.

This goes with any business, but Intel should figure out what its "plus" is.
They own perf/watt and perf/thread, and their uarch, x86, is the standard for
cloud loads. As the cloud matures and becomes more uarch agnostic, everything
being open source, they still have to find a way of differentiating
themselves.

The point is 20 years ago the majority of coders were coding x86, directly,
then 10 years ago say WinIntel, and now our apis are REST calls. That is to
say, the majority of programming has been getting increasingly removed from
the underlying hardware. Intel it seems finally clued in to this with MS
announcing WinRT.

So in short, Intel should start innovating at the platform level. And hey, the
platform isn't just a microprocessor anymore.

~~~
ikono
I can see what you mean to some extent. The top of the line server parts are
still Sandy Bridge-E. By the time Ivy-Bridge-E is out Haswell will be
available on the traditional PC side.

I would actually make a different argument though. As time goes on the
absolute cost of the CPU is not that important. For big data centers lowering
costs is about efficiency more than cheaper hardware. So in my mind a lot of
what Intel is trying to do on the Mobile side, both laptop and
smartphone/tablet, will help them in the data center. If Intel can drive down
both peak and idle power consumption while maintaining or even improving both
single threaded and multi threaded performance, there's potential to really
lower the power needed to run a data center and in turn create a lot of value.

The real question is what's the next big thing going to be? Eventually the
current CPU model will give out to something else. Maybe that's something like
Psi or Tesla or maybe something completely different.

