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The problem is no other laptop manufacturer besides Apple has the capital and resources to build their own chip.
by zucker42 6y ago
The problem is no other laptop manufacturer besides Apple has the capital and resources to build their own chip.
- bgorman 6y agoDefinitely not true, IP blocks are available for all critical features and chip layout can be outsourced. ARM has a Cortex-X chip available for licensing for anyone that wants a high performance CPU core. For example, HP (who also makes laptops) has custom ASICs running Linux in their printers.
- wmf 6y agoEven if you use all licensed IP the market might not be profitable enough to pay back the cost. We're talking about a $50M+ leap of faith.
- bgorman 6y agoHP had 10.2 billion in profit last year. Source: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/HPQ/financials/annual/income-statement https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/HPQ/financials/annual... Certainly enough to take a 50 million dollar risk.
- SomaticPirate 6y agoNot just their own chip, arguable one of the highest performance ones. At Intel, the mobile division was simply trying to keep pace with Arm with Apple always a distant dream. Later at Arm, no one had any idea what the hell Apple was doing. They pay for the ISA and that is basically as far as I ever saw the collaboration going (besides poaching top engineers). Most interesting thing I ever saw was that they bought Intrinsity[1] to create custom EDA tools for them. There is a decent technical moat to overcome. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
- johnwalkr 6y agoDoes anyone know if these EDA and other manufacturing tools are run internally on MacOS? I recall some comments when an Apple factory tour showed some tools running on Windows, on iMacs.
- SomaticPirate 6y agoIf it’s anything like Intel/Arm there are likely huge internal HPC Unix clusters with attached FPGAs for simulation and design. I wouldn’t expect them to.