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Toshiba Pares Losses on Report of Apple Investing in Chips
- IBM 10y agoReuters' story mentions that Apple would take a 20% stake while Foxconn would own 30%. With Toshiba keeping a stake as well [1]. It's certainly not in Apple's interest to let this industry consolidate further [2]. Memory prices have already been on the rise and Apple is using more of it (that actually could be the reason why it's rising). [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-apple-idUSKBN17G085 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-apple-i... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/275886/market-share-held-by-leading-nand-flash-memory-manufacturers-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/275886/market-share-held...
- posguy 10y agoOver the past decade, the memory market has been flooded with cheap chips, causing most players in this market to lose value while breaking even or making a slim profit on memory sales. Hopefully, Apple is planning to single source or majority source their memory through Toshiba, and give them funds to develop more advanced memory on newer processes, as that is what this market needs to develop further and faster. Apple may extend their engineering talent into building their own memory controller perhaps, similar to how they have done a ton of in house design for the ARM SoCs used in the iPhone/iPad lineup, instead of using off the shelf ARM designs.
- IBM 10y agoEven if Apple invests in Toshiba's unit there's no way they're going to use them as a single source. They might give them a guaranteed percent of their NAND orders (especially if they get favorable pricing). It would still be in Apple's interest to shop around. Also they already design memory controllers. They purchased the Israeli company Anobit in 2012 to do just that [1]. That's why Apple's storage benchmarks on recent products are really good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anobit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anobit
- posguy 10y agoApple put their storage on a pcie bus, not too surprising it performs so well..
- yeukhon 10y agoI am surprised to hear the negative sentiment on the memory market as for most users who build computers don't always look for the high-end memory. In fact, I am not sure how much performance gain one get from a high-end RAM on a gaming system.
- posguy 10y agoIIRC it can give a 30% to 40% performance boost on APU based systems, as the increased bandwidth to the GPU allows for much faster processing. Alternatively, Intel decided to put a few hundred megs of cache on their iGPU, which has made their graphics performance much better, and lessened the gains from increased Ram speed. https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-bandwidth-amds-kaveri/ https://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-...
- user5994461 10y agoGamer machines don't use APU, they have a dedicated graphic card.
- user5994461 10y agoAbout 1% last I've seen benchmarks about that. It's so little, it's rather difficult to measure and it doesn't justify the investment.
- hliyan 10y agoVertical integration (e.g. designing and fabricating their own hardware components, sourcing their own raw materials) is probably the best investment of Apple's cash reserves.
- twoodfin 10y agoWhy? Don't they benefit tremendously from building (mostly) on an ultra-competitive, near-commodity components market? When they want something strategic (Retina screens, custom ARM) they make a big investment, but I can't see how getting directly into the fab business gives them any kind of long-run advantage.
- israrkhan 10y agoApple has huge offshore cash reserves. Investing (or acquiring) an offshore company makes sense for them. There are some speculations[1] about Apple buying Disney. I do not think that will be possible without a major tax break. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/rbc-analysts-speculate-apple-acquiring-disney-2017-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/rbc-analysts-speculate-apple-...
- 9935c101ab17a66 10y agoWhile I believe this comment is sincere, it really adds little to the conversation. The first part of it (apple has cash revenues and offshore investments make sense) has always made sense for any offshore company. You don't add any evidence at all to suggest this is more likely than apple buying, say, Blackberry. The second part of your comment seems to put forward in support of the first thing you state, but adds nothing other than a link to the wayward speculation that often plagues apple's hypothetical purchases.
- adventured 10y agoThe Apple-Disney fantasy has been peddled around for years. It crops back up every couple of years, when some analyst or business writer dusts it off for attention. For example, 2011: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-apple-should-buy-disney-2011-04-19 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-apple-should-buy-disney...
- giancarlostoro 10y agoThere was one about Apple buying Twitter that I enjoyed reading. I wish they would either do that or a similar acquisition, it would put their foot into the cloud (outside of iCloud) in a way that might be interesting.
- minikites 10y agoThe first time I heard this was back in 1999 and the reason they were merging was because the bite out of the apple and the "3" in the G3 logo looked like a sideways Mickey head: http://i.imgur.com/YaUWcXM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YaUWcXM.jpg
- Animats 10y agoApple buying the memory business seems uninteresting. That's a commodity business with low margins. Toshiba does make ARM CPUs, and Apple might want to get into the CPU business, but that's not the business being offered for sale.
- kogepathic 10y ago> Apple might want to get into the CPU business Apple is already in the CPU business? Every iPhone and iPad sold in the last 5 years has used an Apple designed CPU core. [0] Apple has chosen to keep the CPU exclusive to their mobile products as they obviously feel it gives them a competitive advantage. They could sell the SoC to others if they wanted to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X
- nkkollaw 10y agoAmazing, the A10 is a quad-core 2.34 GHz CPU. My Late-2016 MacBook Pro has a 2 GHz Intel Core i5. I don't know a lot about CPUs, but isn't the A10 more powerful? Why don't they use them for their laptops, already..?
- proyb2 10y agoIt would make sense to get Intel since lot of development tools and businesses relied on Intel technology. We won't know until LLVM, Clang, Rust and Swift could replace C/C++ in the future.
- nkkollaw 10y agoI see. Perhaps they could do a virtual machine type of thing like they did when they transitioned to Intel (was it called Rosetta?).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- skdotdan 10y agoOwning that much cash, why they don't just buy the companies that they need?
- throwaway40483 10y agoNo way a foreign company will be allowed to buy Toshiba due to national security concerns. One of domestic players will be to chip in and be partial owner.
- nkkollaw 10y agoWhy national security..? If there's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers? (genuinely curious)
- bitexploder 10y agoPerhaps they meant economic security.
- bigtimeidiot 10y ago>If there's a world war and all of a sudden Japan doesn't have computers? Pretty much. If you're at war you need that materials to feed the war machine, which includes the metal to build the plane as well as the computers that go in the cockpit (and let's not forget the knowledge to build it all).
- nkkollaw 10y agoGot it. Kind of makes sense.
- eigenvalue 10y agoThey just don't want the Chinese to get DRAM fab technology and then flood the market with cheap parts.
- abalashov 10y agoI don't think the issue is actually national security as much as preserving Japan's relatively closed economic system of interlocking corporate ownership / keiretsu.
- ksec 10y agoI could understand Apple going into CPU or GPU business. After all when you have 250M annual devices shipment, roughly the size of the whole PC market segment, these high margin cost could be eliminated, not to mention they aren't getting the best or what they need. But Memory? But NAND and DRAM are commodity, in fact for most of their life time Memory companies tends to lose money. Not to mention China are pouring in tens of billions into memory Fabs alongside with billions of other incentives. In pretty much every business Chinese steps in is a race to bottom. I just dont see any value of getting a holding on to a memory fab / capacity.
- anonymfus 10y agoThis could change when/if computational RAM goes mainstream.
- amelius 10y agoWell, I can imagine that if you can build a GPU, then you can also build a memory with processing elements attached to it. Therefore, going after CPU/GPU companies seems more sensible.
- pjc50 10y agoMemory/processing integration is not as simple as it sounds: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/134585/precise-differences-between-dram-and-cmos-processes https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/134585/preci...
- maxerickson 10y agoApple is already designing their own chips, including both CPU + GPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mobile_application_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mobile_application_proce... I guess running a chip foundry isn't something they would benefit a lot from (they can contract for process improvements just as well as they could build them out).
- 10y ago