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I have only skimmed the article but two things jump out: > Recently the company got a fresh incentive to go all-in on silicon: revelations that microprocessors

I have only skimmed the article but two things jump out: > Recently the company got a fresh incentive to go all-in on silicon: revelations that microprocessors with components designed by Intel Corp., Arm Holdings Plc and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. are vulnerable to hacking. Apple isn't immune: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394 (indeed seems iOS devices suffer from Meltdown where AMD devices do not). > The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel. Surely to threaten dominance Apple needs to start selling it's chips to other people? Whilst it's possible it would run counter to the way Apple likes to do things, namely get as much in house a possible to get maximum control and seamless vertical integration, they've never shown any interest in selling bits of their technology to others (well recently anyway).

m_mueller 9y ago
Would IMO totally make sense in markets where they cannot loose anything, like servers, workstations and PCs. Question is whether Apple has what it takes to disrupt completely new markets (with their current management).
- rahoulb 9y ago
  I would suggest Apple has absolutely no interest in those markets. Even when Steve Jobs had been fired, Apple was focussed on products for the end-user, not components for others to assemble from.
PopePompous 9y ago
They might have trouble selling their chips. They optimize far more towards performance over price than Qualcomm does. Apple can afford to do that, because of its high profit margins. Potential buyers probably couldn't afford that tradeoff.
- jagger27 9y ago
  The only market I can think of where higher prices wouldn't be as much of an issue is the server market. Imagine that. High density, Apple designed, ARM SOCs for servers. Or maybe they'll bring back Xserve.
  - fravour 9y ago
    But if you look at their chip design road map they started with an ARM Soc, now they have a motion co-processor, integrated graphics, and an ML chip. The road map of their SoC has been to specialize towards phone applications exclusively, the majority of that stuff just wouldn't make any sense in a server. So what you're asking is not only for them to sell their IP to 3rd parties (a business model of partners they've repeatedly crushed) but also to build out an entirely separate chip design team focused on a new market.
    - acdha 9y ago
      On the other hand, servers are running more GPU / ML workloads these days and semiconductor designs are more automated. It’d be interesting to see if they could cost-effectively sell those designs with, perhaps, capacity tweaks similar to what they’ve done with the iPad X-series releases where the chip design is very similar but they’ve added extra GPU cores, cache, etc. That’d also be consistent with their past history of trying to pick some edge for a particular market: optimized for media processing, ML, VR/AR, etc. rather than just competing with x86 for the generic workloads. I still don’t see it as a high probability but I’d expect a niche if it happens at all.
    - nickpeterson 9y ago
      I just want Apple to team up with Nintendo and make a home console + Apple TV.
      - rizwank 9y ago
        I’ve always felt Apple and Nintendo have a common thread that rarely gets appreciated.
      - 9y ago
simonh 9y ago
Apple may be a (large) minority purchaser of modem chips overall, but it's a hugely dominant chunk of the market for high end devices. If they do their own high end modems, it would gut the high end modem business for Qualcom. That could also drive up prices and jeopardise supply for other high end phone manufacturers. It might even make some high end features uneconomical for Qualcom to include. Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers in CPUs. If they cripple Qualcomm's high end modem business by taking most of it away from them, they could extend the same lead to modems.
- garagemc2 9y ago
  > Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers in CPUs. I hear this statement a lot... how is this determined?
  - tpush 9y ago
    Twitter pundits commenting on Geekbench benchmarks, mostly. Snark aside, Apple's CPUs are pretty(really pretty) far ahead of Qualcomm's in single-threaded performance.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Qualcom's chips tend to struggle to keep up with whatever Apple released two generations ago. But it doesn't matter because if you're building an Android device you can't buy an A chip for it.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Given how highly multithreaded mobile OSes are, that is only advantageous for lazy coding. Any proper iOS application with be doing lots of GCD dispatchs, for starters. Likewise on Android, Google had to change the OS behavior to just kill apps that insist in misusing the UI thread for long running tasks.
      - madeofpalk 9y ago
ksec 9y ago
>The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel. If by dominance being the largest Semiconductor company then yes, possibly. But not because Apple continue to grow infinitely, but both competitor are shrinking. Apple is already close to Intel in terms of processor shipped, and is certainly larger then Intel in terms of CPU. And when Apple decide to have its own modem, Intel will ship another ~150M less unit. Apple has roughly 20% of world wide market share. Qualcomm, with the shrinking % of 300M unit modem to Apple, may one day lost all of that when Apple decide to make it themselves. For the other 80%, there is roughly 20% at the bottom that Qualcomm will not compete in. With less then 60% of market, 40% of those are from Samsung, Huawei, BBK, and Xiaomi. Both Samsung and Huawei are planning to use their own SoC in the high end flagship phone, BBK are thinking of making their own as well. And you have Mediatek making gains at the bottom to mid end of the market. All of a sudden Qualcomm has less then 50% of Smartphone market to work with. If Apple do actually have an team working on Modem, I wonder when will Apple becomes the largest purchaser in Semiconductor.
- petecox 9y ago
  My understanding was that Samsung (Exynos) and Huawei (Kirin) do release global models of their phones based on their own SoC for GSM markets. But they can't overlook the Nth American market where Snapdragon dominates the US with CDMA2000 support.
  - ksec 9y ago
    That is assuming CDMA 2000 is still relevant. You can wonder if anyone using a Flagship Smartphone cares about dropping CDMA support. The world has moved to LTE, and only much more so in the future.
    - ac29 9y ago
      CDMA matters less and less in the US, but for some reason Qualcomm is seemingly the only company making a modem with comprehensive US LTE band support.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
Apple won't sell their components unless its MFi DRM chips. They aren't in the same market segment as Intel, because they don't sell CPUs for consumer or server markets.
partoa 9y ago
Save for posing a major threat to suppliers who rely heavily on them, it would be a surprise if Apple sells its chips to anyone. Their chips are certainly great, if the responsiveness of their iOS devices is anything to go by. The OS and restrictions on background processes doesn’t harm them either. I wish they could somehow share their all advances with everyone. This brings me to my main problem with Apple; as a consumer of technology in a the developing world. For Apple, I don’t exist, or at least the vast majority of my us don’t. The technology is always priced beyond our reach. Some individuals can afford them, but the vast majority have to use alternatives. Any success in slowing down Android would have meant no smart phones for us. Most people I know can’t afford an iPhone. This is what I consider the other side of the Apple story.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  I don't think that's the 'other side' of Apple's story. Respectfully, Apple is/was/tries to be a luxury and aspirational brand. They're expensive, everyone knows it. It's like saying that BMWs fault is that their cars aren't cheap.
  - partoa 9y ago
    I suppose the whole "luxury and inspirational" bit is my problem. Maybe an even bigger part of this is the fact that I don't look at technology the same way I look at cars. More and more, technology is becoming a necessity, more than a luxury. So I find myself routing against Apple, even if I love their phones and tablets. I hope this doesn't make me a hypocrite. Totally unrelated; car manufacturers share technology quite a bit.
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      But cars are a necessity as well (for some parts of the world), and there's cars to fit all sorts of price points in the same way that you get get smartphones and tablets at any price.

m_mueller 9y ago

Would IMO totally make sense in markets where they cannot loose anything, like servers, workstations and PCs. Question is whether Apple has what it takes to disrupt completely new markets (with their current management).

rahoulb 9y ago
I would suggest Apple has absolutely no interest in those markets. Even when Steve Jobs had been fired, Apple was focussed on products for the end-user, not components for others to assemble from.

PopePompous 9y ago

They might have trouble selling their chips. They optimize far more towards performance over price than Qualcomm does. Apple can afford to do that, because of its high profit margins. Potential buyers probably couldn't afford that tradeoff.

jagger27 9y ago
The only market I can think of where higher prices wouldn't be as much of an issue is the server market. Imagine that. High density, Apple designed, ARM SOCs for servers. Or maybe they'll bring back Xserve.
- fravour 9y ago
  But if you look at their chip design road map they started with an ARM Soc, now they have a motion co-processor, integrated graphics, and an ML chip. The road map of their SoC has been to specialize towards phone applications exclusively, the majority of that stuff just wouldn't make any sense in a server. So what you're asking is not only for them to sell their IP to 3rd parties (a business model of partners they've repeatedly crushed) but also to build out an entirely separate chip design team focused on a new market.
  - acdha 9y ago
    On the other hand, servers are running more GPU / ML workloads these days and semiconductor designs are more automated. It’d be interesting to see if they could cost-effectively sell those designs with, perhaps, capacity tweaks similar to what they’ve done with the iPad X-series releases where the chip design is very similar but they’ve added extra GPU cores, cache, etc. That’d also be consistent with their past history of trying to pick some edge for a particular market: optimized for media processing, ML, VR/AR, etc. rather than just competing with x86 for the generic workloads. I still don’t see it as a high probability but I’d expect a niche if it happens at all.
  - nickpeterson 9y ago
    I just want Apple to team up with Nintendo and make a home console + Apple TV.
    - rizwank 9y ago
      I’ve always felt Apple and Nintendo have a common thread that rarely gets appreciated.
    - 9y ago

simonh 9y ago

Apple may be a (large) minority purchaser of modem chips overall, but it's a hugely dominant chunk of the market for high end devices. If they do their own high end modems, it would gut the high end modem business for Qualcom. That could also drive up prices and jeopardise supply for other high end phone manufacturers. It might even make some high end features uneconomical for Qualcom to include. Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers in CPUs. If they cripple Qualcomm's high end modem business by taking most of it away from them, they could extend the same lead to modems.

garagemc2 9y ago
> Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers in CPUs. I hear this statement a lot... how is this determined?
- tpush 9y ago
  Twitter pundits commenting on Geekbench benchmarks, mostly. Snark aside, Apple's CPUs are pretty(really pretty) far ahead of Qualcomm's in single-threaded performance.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Qualcom's chips tend to struggle to keep up with whatever Apple released two generations ago. But it doesn't matter because if you're building an Android device you can't buy an A chip for it.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Given how highly multithreaded mobile OSes are, that is only advantageous for lazy coding. Any proper iOS application with be doing lots of GCD dispatchs, for starters. Likewise on Android, Google had to change the OS behavior to just kill apps that insist in misusing the UI thread for long running tasks.
    - madeofpalk 9y ago

ksec 9y ago

>The result: a chip powerhouse that could one day threaten the dominance of Qualcomm Inc. and even, eventually, Intel. If by dominance being the largest Semiconductor company then yes, possibly. But not because Apple continue to grow infinitely, but both competitor are shrinking. Apple is already close to Intel in terms of processor shipped, and is certainly larger then Intel in terms of CPU. And when Apple decide to have its own modem, Intel will ship another ~150M less unit. Apple has roughly 20% of world wide market share. Qualcomm, with the shrinking % of 300M unit modem to Apple, may one day lost all of that when Apple decide to make it themselves. For the other 80%, there is roughly 20% at the bottom that Qualcomm will not compete in. With less then 60% of market, 40% of those are from Samsung, Huawei, BBK, and Xiaomi. Both Samsung and Huawei are planning to use their own SoC in the high end flagship phone, BBK are thinking of making their own as well. And you have Mediatek making gains at the bottom to mid end of the market. All of a sudden Qualcomm has less then 50% of Smartphone market to work with. If Apple do actually have an team working on Modem, I wonder when will Apple becomes the largest purchaser in Semiconductor.

petecox 9y ago
My understanding was that Samsung (Exynos) and Huawei (Kirin) do release global models of their phones based on their own SoC for GSM markets. But they can't overlook the Nth American market where Snapdragon dominates the US with CDMA2000 support.
- ksec 9y ago
  That is assuming CDMA 2000 is still relevant. You can wonder if anyone using a Flagship Smartphone cares about dropping CDMA support. The world has moved to LTE, and only much more so in the future.
  - ac29 9y ago
    CDMA matters less and less in the US, but for some reason Qualcomm is seemingly the only company making a modem with comprehensive US LTE band support.

kevin_b_er 9y ago

Apple won't sell their components unless its MFi DRM chips. They aren't in the same market segment as Intel, because they don't sell CPUs for consumer or server markets.

partoa 9y ago

Save for posing a major threat to suppliers who rely heavily on them, it would be a surprise if Apple sells its chips to anyone. Their chips are certainly great, if the responsiveness of their iOS devices is anything to go by. The OS and restrictions on background processes doesn’t harm them either. I wish they could somehow share their all advances with everyone. This brings me to my main problem with Apple; as a consumer of technology in a the developing world. For Apple, I don’t exist, or at least the vast majority of my us don’t. The technology is always priced beyond our reach. Some individuals can afford them, but the vast majority have to use alternatives. Any success in slowing down Android would have meant no smart phones for us. Most people I know can’t afford an iPhone. This is what I consider the other side of the Apple story.

madeofpalk 9y ago
I don't think that's the 'other side' of Apple's story. Respectfully, Apple is/was/tries to be a luxury and aspirational brand. They're expensive, everyone knows it. It's like saying that BMWs fault is that their cars aren't cheap.
- partoa 9y ago
  I suppose the whole "luxury and inspirational" bit is my problem. Maybe an even bigger part of this is the fact that I don't look at technology the same way I look at cars. More and more, technology is becoming a necessity, more than a luxury. So I find myself routing against Apple, even if I love their phones and tablets. I hope this doesn't make me a hypocrite. Totally unrelated; car manufacturers share technology quite a bit.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    But cars are a necessity as well (for some parts of the world), and there's cars to fit all sorts of price points in the same way that you get get smartphones and tablets at any price.