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Because Apple is going to prove TSMC is capable of building x86 destroying processors. Not in theory. Not academic or institutional one offs... no, it’ll be mas

Because Apple is going to prove TSMC is capable of building x86 destroying processors. Not in theory. Not academic or institutional one offs... no, it’ll be mass-produced and in the hands of consumers. Intel’s failure to get their fabs running has put them into a death spiral unless they pull off a miracle. Also, if Apples ARM chips are really that fast they will be purchased by the shipload to be sent to performance critical operations like HFT. They will be put into servers or turned into them to squeeze and eek out every possible advantage... which will shit on intels most profitable lines (Xeons for single threaded workloads). It’s gonna be a crazy time.

aurizon 6y ago
Apple has a similarly onerous history of monopoly action - watch what you wish for, you may get it.
- sosborn 6y ago
  The situation is a bit different though. If Apple's plan was to produce processors for the likes of HP, Dell, etc, then maybe that would be an issue. But I highly doubt they will move into those markets. It's AMD that's poised to take over that space.
thu2111 6y ago
Apple haven't ever been really interested in or committed to non-consumer markets.
- pram 6y ago
  “Haven’t ever” is simply not true. Apple has had plenty of historical server products, including dedicated rack servers with the Xserve line. That’s not to say it’s likely but it’s not unprecedented ;P
  - thu2111 6y ago
    And they scrapped them. That's exactly my point. They were not committed: they made an uncompetitive product for a few years and bailed instead of trying harder. Compare to the Mac.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I don't think they were really interested in the market honestly. They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps. It was all about supporting the Apple developer community. They cut it as soon as it wasn't necessary, IMO.
    - jsjohnst 6y ago
      > They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps Actually, the Xserve platform really had nothing to do with that. Xserve’s were partly designed and built for the high end video production industry (as an extension of the Mac Pro hardware) and partly as a general purpose small to medium size business file server / web server (which the Mac Mini has subsumed what’s left of that space).
- trhway 6y ago
  yes, yet cloud changes it as the naturally non-consumer thing - cloud datacenters - are needed by the Apple itself to serve the consumer oriented cloud based functionality. So, it may so happen that the major money saving from their own chip would be not on the consumer devices, instead it would be Apple's datacenter/cloud costs/density/efficiency/etc., and that improvement on those metrics can also enable and push Apple further into cloud business.
TwoBit 6y ago
x86/x64 is such a terrible bloated messy instruction set. It really needs to die. I'd like to see the ARM16 and ARM32 variants die too, as they are also bad.
ricketycricket 6y ago
There is no scenario in which Apple's ARM chips will be sold to 3rd parties.
- yazaddaruvala 6y ago
  Why not? Apple used to sell servers. It could easily sell its chips to Azure or GCP to compete with Amazon’s Graviton chips. It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard, it’ll further amortize overall dev costs by increasing volumes, people can develop better algorithms with their custom hardware accelerators for ML and etc, it’s a great way to fight the current anti-trust cases against Apple. There are some pretty good reasons for Apple to sell their chips to 3rd parties.
  - AgentOrange1234 6y ago
    They could probably make money there, but it would take time and energy to do, doesn’t seem like it helps their brand, and seems generally a bit afield for them. Then again, they started their own TV studio, so what do know.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard... They're just ARM chips. So long as Amazon otherwise plans to build their own ARMs, there's no real benefit. Apple is looking out for #1.

aurizon 6y ago

Apple has a similarly onerous history of monopoly action - watch what you wish for, you may get it.

sosborn 6y ago
The situation is a bit different though. If Apple's plan was to produce processors for the likes of HP, Dell, etc, then maybe that would be an issue. But I highly doubt they will move into those markets. It's AMD that's poised to take over that space.

thu2111 6y ago

Apple haven't ever been really interested in or committed to non-consumer markets.

pram 6y ago
“Haven’t ever” is simply not true. Apple has had plenty of historical server products, including dedicated rack servers with the Xserve line. That’s not to say it’s likely but it’s not unprecedented ;P
- thu2111 6y ago
  And they scrapped them. That's exactly my point. They were not committed: they made an uncompetitive product for a few years and bailed instead of trying harder. Compare to the Mac.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  I don't think they were really interested in the market honestly. They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps. It was all about supporting the Apple developer community. They cut it as soon as it wasn't necessary, IMO.
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    > They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps Actually, the Xserve platform really had nothing to do with that. Xserve’s were partly designed and built for the high end video production industry (as an extension of the Mac Pro hardware) and partly as a general purpose small to medium size business file server / web server (which the Mac Mini has subsumed what’s left of that space).
trhway 6y ago
yes, yet cloud changes it as the naturally non-consumer thing - cloud datacenters - are needed by the Apple itself to serve the consumer oriented cloud based functionality. So, it may so happen that the major money saving from their own chip would be not on the consumer devices, instead it would be Apple's datacenter/cloud costs/density/efficiency/etc., and that improvement on those metrics can also enable and push Apple further into cloud business.

TwoBit 6y ago

x86/x64 is such a terrible bloated messy instruction set. It really needs to die. I'd like to see the ARM16 and ARM32 variants die too, as they are also bad.

ricketycricket 6y ago

There is no scenario in which Apple's ARM chips will be sold to 3rd parties.

yazaddaruvala 6y ago
Why not? Apple used to sell servers. It could easily sell its chips to Azure or GCP to compete with Amazon’s Graviton chips. It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard, it’ll further amortize overall dev costs by increasing volumes, people can develop better algorithms with their custom hardware accelerators for ML and etc, it’s a great way to fight the current anti-trust cases against Apple. There are some pretty good reasons for Apple to sell their chips to 3rd parties.
- AgentOrange1234 6y ago
  They could probably make money there, but it would take time and energy to do, doesn’t seem like it helps their brand, and seems generally a bit afield for them. Then again, they started their own TV studio, so what do know.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard... They're just ARM chips. So long as Amazon otherwise plans to build their own ARMs, there's no real benefit. Apple is looking out for #1.