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Yeah, it never would have been that profitable to be an ARM vendor for Apple. I couldn't even remember who made the chips in the iPhone 1, I had to look up that

Yeah, it never would have been that profitable to be an ARM vendor for Apple. I couldn't even remember who made the chips in the iPhone 1, I had to look up that it was Samsung. If Intel managed to convince Apple to go x86, and they had low power chips competitive with ARM at the time, then that would be a different story. You could even argue that it was a happy accident; Intel providing a high performance ARM core may have forced mobile competitors to react, producing high performance ARM chips of their own, and sped up the erosion of the x86 monopoly we're finally witnessing today by several years.

GeekyBear 6y ago
Intel refusing Apple's business and not moving into handheld mobile devices put a whole lot of R&D money into the pockets of Intel's rivals. I doubt TSMC would have been able to afford to catch up to Intel without their current high volume business.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  If they stayed with Intel for a very long time, I agree. But I don't think that would have happened. Apple pursued custom silicon very aggressively from the start, with the acquisition of PA Semi less than a year after the launch, and the first custom chip coming in the iPad in 2010. Although with an Intel chip they wouldn't have needed to do this for performance reasons, Intel's fat gross margins would have been equally compelling. If Intel was willing to design the chips and take TSMC sized margins on them, I guess they could have kept the iPhone business for years, but that isn't in their DNA. I can't see Intel ARM iPhone chips as anything other than a shortly lived oddity.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    My assumption is that if Intel had gotten serious about mobile devices, Apple would not have been their only customer. By sending all that business to TSMC and Samsung, they were financing their rival's R&D.
    - reitzensteinm 6y ago
      Getting serious about mobile devices means dropping their historic 60% gross margin target. If they were willing to do that, I totally buy in to your scenario. It would have been the right play with the benefit of hindsight. But it would have represented the biggest shift in their business model since they dropped DRAM. Just agreeing to fab the iPhone 1 CPU wouldn't have been nearly enough.
      - GeekyBear 6y ago
        In a 2013 interview, Intel's Paul Otellini had already come to see that refusing to enter the mobile device market was a mistake. >It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-otellinis-intel-can-the-company-that-built-the-future-survive-it/275825/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
        reitzensteinm 6y ago
        Right, but I don't believe this is evidence they'd have been willing to do what it takes. Keep in mind that they didn't quit their Xeon Phi strategy until 2017, four years after that interview. The parallels are strong. It's an equally valuable market to mobile, but they weren't willing to get their hands dirty, build a commodity GPU, and either a CUDA bridge ala ROCm or concerted effort on bringing OpenCL up to speed. Instead, they tried for a decade to bring x86 to GPGPU, not for any technical advantage, but because if they can make it stick they can be an (at worst) duopolistic vendor. They started with in order cores little better than a Pentium with massive vector units, and progressively improved them to Atom cores once it became clear how much work you'd have to do to port legacy x86 code on to them, at which point why not just port to CUDA? Now the Xeon Phi torch will be passed to... absolutely standard Xeons with HBM. And they're building that general purpose GPGPU, but it's going up against a version of CUDA that's had a decade longer to mature and a nVidia with 102% of their market cap, instead of 9.9%. The reason for this insanity is Intel realized just how profitable monopolies are, and they're willing to make risky (almost stupid) bets in the hope that they'll yield their next one. They're searching for the home runs with little enthusiasm or staying power for anything else. This is the Intel I know, and it's not the kind of Intel that's willing to take crappy gross margins to fab commodity ARM chips. It's the kind of Intel that's going to try to do everything in its power to cram so very out of place Atom processors in to mobiles in the vein hope they'll catch on through a combination of incentives and temporary consumer insanity. Which is exactly what they did try instead of the ARM thing, from 2008 to 2016. RIP. If Intel did make ARM CPU for the original iPhone and other early mobiles, it would have followed the same trajectory as Intel's original SSDs. They'd be years ahead of their competition at launch, but left to stagnate as the rest of the market catches up, once Intel realizes they're actually going to have to work for their money with no sustainable advantage.

GeekyBear 6y ago

Intel refusing Apple's business and not moving into handheld mobile devices put a whole lot of R&D money into the pockets of Intel's rivals. I doubt TSMC would have been able to afford to catch up to Intel without their current high volume business.

reitzensteinm 6y ago
If they stayed with Intel for a very long time, I agree. But I don't think that would have happened. Apple pursued custom silicon very aggressively from the start, with the acquisition of PA Semi less than a year after the launch, and the first custom chip coming in the iPad in 2010. Although with an Intel chip they wouldn't have needed to do this for performance reasons, Intel's fat gross margins would have been equally compelling. If Intel was willing to design the chips and take TSMC sized margins on them, I guess they could have kept the iPhone business for years, but that isn't in their DNA. I can't see Intel ARM iPhone chips as anything other than a shortly lived oddity.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  My assumption is that if Intel had gotten serious about mobile devices, Apple would not have been their only customer. By sending all that business to TSMC and Samsung, they were financing their rival's R&D.
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    Getting serious about mobile devices means dropping their historic 60% gross margin target. If they were willing to do that, I totally buy in to your scenario. It would have been the right play with the benefit of hindsight. But it would have represented the biggest shift in their business model since they dropped DRAM. Just agreeing to fab the iPhone 1 CPU wouldn't have been nearly enough.
    - GeekyBear 6y ago
      In a 2013 interview, Intel's Paul Otellini had already come to see that refusing to enter the mobile device market was a mistake. >It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-otellinis-intel-can-the-company-that-built-the-future-survive-it/275825/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
      - reitzensteinm 6y ago
        Right, but I don't believe this is evidence they'd have been willing to do what it takes. Keep in mind that they didn't quit their Xeon Phi strategy until 2017, four years after that interview. The parallels are strong. It's an equally valuable market to mobile, but they weren't willing to get their hands dirty, build a commodity GPU, and either a CUDA bridge ala ROCm or concerted effort on bringing OpenCL up to speed. Instead, they tried for a decade to bring x86 to GPGPU, not for any technical advantage, but because if they can make it stick they can be an (at worst) duopolistic vendor. They started with in order cores little better than a Pentium with massive vector units, and progressively improved them to Atom cores once it became clear how much work you'd have to do to port legacy x86 code on to them, at which point why not just port to CUDA? Now the Xeon Phi torch will be passed to... absolutely standard Xeons with HBM. And they're building that general purpose GPGPU, but it's going up against a version of CUDA that's had a decade longer to mature and a nVidia with 102% of their market cap, instead of 9.9%. The reason for this insanity is Intel realized just how profitable monopolies are, and they're willing to make risky (almost stupid) bets in the hope that they'll yield their next one. They're searching for the home runs with little enthusiasm or staying power for anything else. This is the Intel I know, and it's not the kind of Intel that's willing to take crappy gross margins to fab commodity ARM chips. It's the kind of Intel that's going to try to do everything in its power to cram so very out of place Atom processors in to mobiles in the vein hope they'll catch on through a combination of incentives and temporary consumer insanity. Which is exactly what they did try instead of the ARM thing, from 2008 to 2016. RIP. If Intel did make ARM CPU for the original iPhone and other early mobiles, it would have followed the same trajectory as Intel's original SSDs. They'd be years ahead of their competition at launch, but left to stagnate as the rest of the market catches up, once Intel realizes they're actually going to have to work for their money with no sustainable advantage.