As we all know, Intel used to be famous for their engineering and their ability to scale up a newer, smaller process with way earlier commercial viability. This all ended with the Sisyphean 10nm move that was years late and honestly Intel just don't seem to have recovered from it.
So Intel seemingly has underutilized fab capacity whereas the likes of TSMC and Samsung can probably produce every chip they make with demand to spare. Given the CHIPS Act that was passed under Biden, the Trump admin taking a stake in Intel and the environment of tariffs and a push for American manufacturing, everything seems to be lining up for someone to take advantage of Inte's physical fabs and American production and that could be Apple.
It's not so much ripping off the designs - nothing of what Apple Silicon is doing is particularly surprising and both x86 and Intel's microarchitectures are sufficiently different to Apple Silicon/ARM that knowledge of specific implementation approaches wouldn't be directly useful in most cases.
The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.
M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC. Anandtech was observing that Apple had better IPC in their phone chips YEARS before M1. Lots of people discredited it as "apples and oranges" because the ISAs were different, but investigative teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.
This has both a technical and human component.
On the human side, top x86 execs refused to see any threat coming. They must have thought Apple couldn't overcome the x86 software moat, thought the chips were for servers, consoles, or some other non-PC device, or perhaps they simply couldn't believe what their investigative teams told them.
At the same time, we're 6 years post-launch. The proof of ARM's capability is clear. x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86. Either all the x86 engineers are completely incompetent and incapable of learning from years of ARM designs or there are aspects of x86 that makes copying those designs infeasible.
> M1 released 6 years ago, but AMD/Intel still can't get close to ARM cores in IPC.
> teams from Intel and AMD absolutely HAD to know the truth.
These people are professionals that acknowledge IPC is a stupid metric. If you switch your statement to SIMD throughput, now ARM NEON has the lower IPC and x86 looks like space age technology. They're optimized for different workloads.
x86 vendors recognized that they could recoup the majority of efficiency that Apple Silicon has without buying an architectural license for ARM. Intel invested early on big.LITTLE, and AMD drilled down on denser nodes for their preexisting designs. As both businesses converge on each other's ideas, their SOCs have adapted most of ARMs' greatest mobile innovations. Even before that, x86 hardware was always usable - AMD was shipping faster integrated GPUs than the M1 Pro before the M1 ever hit shelves.
All of this makes sense, nothing objectively prevents the x86 architecture from being power-efficient. Arm LTD. would have gouged any of those vendors for their IP, and even with an architectural license it's not like AMD or Intel would get usable core designs from Arm. There was no reason to pivot to ARM for either company, they both saw Qualcomm and could read the writing on the wall.
> x86 server marketshare is about to hit just 50% and Microsoft is pushing ARM hard as a replacement for x86
That's Nvidia's work, no credit is due to Microsoft or Apple for reshaping the server market. Apple's early ARM hardware was outright ignored for server/HPC applications, leading to the discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Apple was entirely incapable of pivoting their mobile chipsets to the server scale, surprising nobody that had paid attention to Apple's godawful raster/GPGPU acceleration stack. The Ultra hardware looked like a dog's dinner compared to x86 arches like CDNA.
The Graviton and Grace chips that displaced x86 servers did it because they are slower, cheaper and less feature-dense. Graviton for the bare minimum of Raspberry Pi-tier web serving, and Grace for the high-end of "we need CUDA and enough bandwidth for Infiniband" that made trillions in the HPC market.
> The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.
While I'm sure some level of internal leakage does take place, at least on paper the fab's planning needs to be firewalled off from their own chip roadmap.
I'm also not sure how much Apple actually cares, tbh. Yes, they currently have an edge in silicon, but it's heavily due to being willing to outspend everyone else, and their real superpower is vertical integration - which Intel isn't in a position to compete with.
I think Apple doesn't really have a choice. They've been very strongly encouraged by the current US government to move as much chip manufacturing to the US as possible, and particularly to make Intel Foundry work, or face... problems.
Also the AI boom means NVIDIA et al. can afford to buy TSMC's best processes at scale, which means less available capacity for Apple.
I'm sure given no other forces at work, Apple would prefer to stick with what they were doing previously, buying the lion's share of TSMC's best process.
I mean in the opposite sense. If Intel can glean enough from Apple's roadmap to close the performance/watt gap, great, but they still can't match the vertical integration Apple has
https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel...
Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now.
The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone.
Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.