I had been tiny bit acquainted of this your broadcast provided bright
clear concept

tl;dr

1. Mobile and laptop CPUs are converging
2. Intel is further along the convergence path than Qualcomm (and presumably other ARM SoC vendors with the possible exception of Apple).
3. Intel is better positioned in GPUs (probably the weakest part of the argument)
4. Intel’s process edge is the big hammer on top.

I don’t know if they’re right, but it is an impressive argument (and an impressive call if they are).

The Intel worry is declining PC/notebook sales even with Ultrabooks round the corner. The rise of Qualcomm based PCs indicates that low power consumption will rule even this segment, so Intel has to get power usage down, down, down.

With the Motorola acquision, Google has a full platform in place; Apple has a full platform in place and perhaps MS is getting there soon. If Intel can not become a preferred choice for any of these 3, it will loose the mobile/tablet battle.

Apple’s innovation power and ability to draw folks such as Toshiba into their fold gives them an edge for now. However, as low cost android devices hit India, China etc., they will be under pressure to change-the-game again..and Intel could be a handy and willing partner.

Fingers crossed!

Is there really a problem between Samsung and Apple? Apple can’t have 100% of revenues, 74% with samsung taking 26% and all other phone makers losing money, samsung and apple are the only things keeping each other out of courts they don’t want to be in. It could just be a ruse, you sue us, we sue you, looks like competition. Just as Apple and MS are more partners now than competitors, concealed with ruses (I always wondered if E.S. left google more because he realized what pissing of apple and scaring MS would lead too, google generates cash, but now what a combined Apple and MS, bring in terms of purchasing power), so the situations with samsung could possible the same.

Maybe Apple could enter a joint partnership with TSMC to produce A6 chips and other future SoCs. Apple could build a foundry in the US. Right next to the Samsung foundry in Austin Texas, where A5 chips are currently being made.

Originally, the PPC chips were superior to the intel offerings. Everyone wanted to run on the better platform… But since there was such a small desktop market, it didn’t make since for Motorola/IBM to invest in clock speed improvements, so apple & Be were left in the dust and had to switch to the one supplier that had the performance they needed — even though the platform is one awful kludge on top of another

In the new ARM vs Intel mobile space, arm has the better platform, better performance, and better power consumption. (and better price). I cannot think of any way intel can compete in this space with an X86 ISA

With both Apple and Microsoft shipping ARM operating systems, Intel may be more worried about ARM creeping back onto the desktop- and may simply be fighting the desktop war from an advance position in the mobile space.

Because low-end devices are the new micros of the 1970s. Original Apple desktops helped lead to what we have today, displacing minicomputers, mainframes (servers) and even supercomputers (cloud). The same evolution of power will happen with portable devices — and they will replace the bulky desktops we have today. Intel can either sit by and fight and lose or join in and survive the transition.

2. ARM chips are starting to make inroads in high-performance computing servers because of the low cost and low power usage. It’s no coincidence all the major Linux distros are beefing up their ARM strategies.

3. Samsung plays hardball, yes. But so does Intel. Only the paranoid survive, as they say.

That would be the opposite of what worked well for the Mac, because the positions of Intel and ARM are reversed when you move from PC’s to mobile.

Switching the Mac from PowerPC to Intel moved Apple from an architecture that had about 3% of the total market to one that had about 97% of the total market. Switching the iPad from ARM to Intel would move Apple the other way, from ARM’s 99% plus to Intel’s less than 1%.

Apple has so many software advantages, integration advantages, design advantages, retailing advantages, service advantages — and so on — that the #1 thing I think they need from a CPU architecture is for it not to be a disadvantage. In other words, Apple needs their CPU’s to be at least on par with all of their competitors. So by using Intel, they ensured that they would be equal with HP and Dell in CPU power, and so the competition would be on other points, and it has been, ever since the Intel Mac. By using ARM in mobile, every generation of ARM reference designs benefits both Apple and all their competitors equally. If Apple is the only mobile on Intel then maybe that benefits Apple some years (like PowerPC did some years) and maybe it hurts Apple some years (again, like PowerPC) but it is better just to remove that consideration altogether and essentially use the same CPU as everyone else but add value above that in GPU, firmware, system software, app platform, cloud services, retail, support, and so on.

The Mac running Intel and iPad running ARM makes the CPU a constant, like AC power. A Mac running PowerPC or ARM is risky. An iPad running Intel is risky. There are just so many other ways for Apple to add value than experimental CPU architectures.

> I don’t see Apple losing its appetite for customization and ownership

I agree with that. The A5 is the one and only SoC in the world that was designed for a mobile PC rather than a mobile phone. It has exponentially more GPU than any other chip. The GPU was built to run a next-generation high-DPI PC screen like on iPad (3.) The SoC is equivalent to the Mac’s motherboard, which Apple also makes, even though they can get generic from Intel. So in both Mac and iPad and iPhone it is a huge advantage for Apple to build everything above the CPU.

The Windows RT tablets that are coming to try and compete with iPad are going to do so on SoC’s that were designed to be sold to generic phone makers. It’s going to be a really severe limitation to run PC apps and a PC screen on there.

> First, there would be no border war. Unlike Samsung, Intel
> doesn’t make smartphones and tablets. Intel sells to
> manufacturers and Apple sells to humans.

I think there is already a border war between Apple and Intel. Intel sells to generic manufacturers. Steve Jobs characterized the problem with working with Intel as 1) too slow, 2) whatever Apple teaches them, they will turn around and sell it to Apple’s generic competitors. Look at Ultrabook. The “new” MacBook Air at $999 was essentially Apple cloning their own original $1799 MacBook Air from 3 years before. There is no need for anyone else to clone MacBook Air. The way you can see this is that the companies that have attempted to do so have not been able to do it without subsidies from Intel, and even then, the systems are the same price or just a little less than a MacBook Air even though they are larger and have way fewer features. That is not competitive; that is anti-competitive. Further, selling a consumer an $899 Ultrabook with 20% of the features of a $999 MacBook Air is not advantageous to the consumer.

So if Apple were to switch iPad to Intel then within a few years you would see Intel offering an UltraPad specification for generic hardware makers which would be the guts of an Apple iPad. Right now, nobody but Apple can buy the guts of an iPad, because nobody but Apple can make the guts of an iPad.

@Charbax – Because it is far more likely for every person in the world to own a phone than a computer. And what happens when your phone IS your computer, storing all of your data, with a keyboard and monitor shared in a group? Then Intel is REALLY screwed.

And we seem to be repeating the story again and all of the promises Intel is making with Haswell. But this time, Intel has to deal with real competitors like Samsung, nVidia, Qualcomm, and TI instead of AMD, and they will not go down without a fight.

Apple is in the $500 profit/device business while using ARM in iPhone. $250 profit/device using ARM in iPad. Why would Apple want to give Intel a part of that money?

The Android ecosystem allows for $25 profit/device smartphone and tablet to basically take over 90% of the smartphone and tablet market within the year. Apple obviously is going to have to give up profits or market share.

Samsung has already become the number 1 smartphone maker, they can then triple revenue/profits and market share every year and just laugh in Korea. Apple could combine weaknesses with Intel, at the same time loose profits, loose market share, fail and collapse on so many different levels at the same time. That’s it. Apple should use all its cash to buy Facebook before the IPO, Apple should use Intel in smartphones and tablets to accelerate its collapse of profits and market share, and that would mean a quick AAPL bankruptcy. Going from being worlds biggest company to bankrupt in 1 year would be a fantastic story.