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Apple and Intel Rumored to Partner on Mac Chips
- mushufasa 1y agoThis is the type of rumor that could swing a stock price... I'm skeptical of how this got out there and by whom.
- wetpaws 1y ago[dead]
- LeFantome 1y ago[flagged]
- petcat 1y agoThe US government itself owns $11 billion worth of Intel stock. So just look there.
- NuclearPM 1y agoYou’re suggesting altruistic nationalistic corruption?
- sethops1 1y agoNot sure about altruistic, but definitely corrupt.
- downrightmike 1y agoNo, keep Intel afloat by any means, because USA is planning on attacking Venezuela and China. Maybe VZ is used to gear up production for the Taiwan war. There are a few ways to save the economy, hyperinflation (pay massive 38T debt with worthless paper), Jubilee (erase all debts like the fall of Rome) or war and mass death and destruction (WW2 and the Black Death).
- KerrAvon 1y agoRemember that the people running the US government at the moment are a combination of mentally deranged ideologues and Fox News bimbos. There is no actual plan for anything.
- dagmx 1y agoThere is most definitely a plan, at least behind the scenes. They’re executing it pretty aggressively too https://project2025.observer/en https://project2025.observer/en
- Keyframe 1y agoNvidia also owns 5% of intel. Does that mean dreaded enemies collaborating again?
- 1659447091 1y agoI am curious if anyone has tracked the full scale of this admins events+inflammatory news bits and found questionable patterns like the Tylenol claims just before a large sale and then mostly nothing, or the tariff roller-coaster and insider trading allegations, or other sleigh-of-hand type patterns. Given the well-known "flood the zone" type strategy.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoyou can find all sorts of interesting trade analyses at https://quiverquant.com https://quiverquant.com because that's what they do, mining public datasets, including mandated congressional trade disclosures. no affiliation, just fascinating stuff there.
- Izikiel43 1y agoIs this 2006 again?
- timw4mail 1y agoTo fab the CPUs...seems more plausible than anything else with Intel.
- bigyabai 1y agoAFAIK Intel Foundry Services are the only product they can't find big customers for. Apple would be the first if they move past the sampling phase.
- turtletontine 1y agoThey’ve already secured Microsoft as a customer, they’ll be making the next Maia AI accelerator for Azure on 18A. Apple would be a much bigger catch for sure, but they have in fact secured one big customer.
- alecco 1y agoAn insignificant token to appease growing discontent by American people. Apple was investing in China around "$55 billion per year by 2015".
- baq 1y agothey did it with the modem previously, the second supplier was strictly worse, but they need to have a negotiating position with their single point of failure supplier
- mschuster91 1y ago> but they need to have a negotiating position with their single point of failure supplier They don't. Apple has an Architecture License for ARM, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If you're referring to TSMC - it shouldn't be too much of a problem for Apple to go and contract Samsung instead, at least assuming Samsung can keep up the yield. Intel isn't a competitor to either TSMC or Samsung, their fab process is years behind.
- bigyabai 1y agoStrictly speaking, Samsung currently has no analogous product to 18A or TSMC 2nm.
- deaddodo 1y agoIntel’s 18A is closer to availability (functional, ramping to production) than Samsung’s SF2 (still in dev/testing phase); which is roughly analogous to TSMC N2. TSMC is ahead, as usual, but Intel is closer than Samsung (in this specific case).
- roody15 1y ago“ Such metrics are often closely guarded trade secrets. But according to the Dailian report, Samsung's yields for SF2 are in the 50% to 60% range, just high enough for commercial production. The same report puts TSMC's upcoming N2 node at 80%” Looks like Samsung is actually closer to production than Intel 18A which is still having issues with yields. https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/samsungs-next-gen-2nm-node-is-in-mass-production-but-will-it-beat-tsmcs-n2-silicon-to-market-and-help-make-chips-cheaper/ https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/samsungs-nex...
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- hedora 1y agoSo, they’re going to use a more power hungry process for the low end devices? The whole point of the Air and SE lines was that they were lightweight and compact. Watching a company at that scale completely lose its own plot is depressing. Did they replace Cook with an LLM that compacted its context one too many times? Edit: This is a bad look for intel too. How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation? “This low end Apple gizmo is a hot mess because it has Intel Inside. Also, it’s $50 more than last year. MAGA!”
- progval 1y agoWhat makes you think they are going to be more power-hungry than if Apple manufactured them itself?
- hedora 1y agoThe article says it’s going on Intel 18a, which has better performance, but worse density/power consumption than TSMC’s comparable node: https://www.techspot.com/news/106782-intel-18a-found-faster-but-tsmc-n2-denser.html https://www.techspot.com/news/106782-intel-18a-found-faster-... Unless Apple is going to add active cooling or something to the Air, iPad and iPhone, I’d expect more thermal throttling on the intel chips (though the difference isn’t as stark as I assumed — it looks like Intel closed the gap a bit with 18a).
- bigyabai 1y agoTSMC's 2nm is much, much higher demand. Apple's probably getting priced-out of the node by Nvidia in much the same way Apple bought out TSMC 5nm before. Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.
- GeekyBear 1y agoTSMC and Apple have a long standing partnership, and I doubt TSMC is dumb enough to throw a massive amount of long term business away in exchange for short term AI bubble gains. TSMC has even been cutting Apple special terms they don't give others: > every time TSMC introduces a major upgrade, called an advanced process node, to its chipmaking, the defect rates of the dies stay relatively high until it can iron out the kinks. For 3 nm, the most cutting-edge node launching this year, the yield on wafers has recently been in the range of 70% to 80%, according to analysts, as well as one person with direct knowledge of the process. That number would be a tough pill to swallow for TSMC’s customers, which typically pay for the wafer and all of the dies on it—including the bad ones. But in a break from standard practice, the Taiwanese manufacturer has only been charging Apple for dies that work—“known good dies,” in industry parlance—these people said. https://archive.ph/yfGLp https://archive.ph/yfGLp
- lloydatkinson 1y agoAgain? I’m kind of surprised Intel wants anything to do with them after the M stuff. Things must be really bad at Intel.
- mschuster91 1y agoIntel knows that it's their own fault Apple ditched Intel for M CPUs. Intel couldn't provide any meaningful improvements particularly for MacBooks for years.
- SG- 1y agoyou been in a cave for the last few years? things are bad at Intel for a while now and they need a fab customers. the deal they will likely throw at Apple to get capacity and show off their fab process doesn't suck is likely incredible.
- lloydatkinson 1y agoI have not been in a cave
- GeekyBear 1y agoThe word was that TSMC was previously looking to charge much more for their 2nm node. Apple may have just been looking to apply pricing pressure. > TSMC has finalized the pricing for its upcoming 2nm process, setting the wafer price at around $30,000. This marks a 10%–20% increase compared with the 3nm process average of $25,000–$27,000, lower than earlier market speculation of a 50% hike. https://technode.com/2025/10/09/tsmc-sets-2nm-wafer-price-at-30000-far-below-earlier-50-increase-speculation/ https://technode.com/2025/10/09/tsmc-sets-2nm-wafer-price-at...
- CharlesW 1y ago> Apple may just be looking to apply pricing pressure. Even if TSMC wasn't going to tighten the screws, it makes sense that Apple would be talking to Intel since Apple abhors single-source external dependencies. Plus, it gives them brownie points with our Grifter In Chief. https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/intel-and-trump-administration-reach-historic-agreement-to https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
- GeekyBear 1y ago> Apple abhors single-source external dependencies. Apple previously dual sourced SOCs from both TSMC and Samsung, before dropping Samsung. The performance and power efficiency has to be there. If Intel can get good yields and performance/power efficiency from their new process node, then it can be worth the added complexity.
- mort96 1y agoAnd if there's a chance that Intel can get good yields and performance/power efficiency from a new process node, then it's 100% worth it for Apple to already be in talks with them when it becomes available.
- lostlogin 1y ago> Apple may have just been looking to apply pricing pressure. It fits perfectly with Apples sucking up to Trump too.
- dbg31415 1y agoPlease tell me this means we can have Bootcamp back?
- SG- 1y agowhy would it? they're only intereated in Intel's fab, not their actualy CPU technology. they're looking at diversifying they their fab stuff so it's not only TSMC.
- dbg31415 1y agoPartnerships could mean more than just fab capacity -- maybe even incentives to build an instruction translation layer so software built for Intel chips could run natively on Apple Silicon. Something like Rosetta, but at the hardware level. Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea? Was Boot Camp really that unpopular? I always enjoyed it -- especially for gaming. Sure, laptops weren't ideal, but even then the same games ran noticeably better on Windows than on macOS.
- astrange 1y agoIf Microsoft wanted Windows to run on Macs it would do it. There's ARM64 Windows already. You wouldn't enjoy it because it has an Apple GPU and most of the appeal in a Windows PC is the completely different Nvidia GPU.
- SpecialistK 1y agoIt's both technically and economically unviable for Apple. For one, Intel's x86 IP is covered by lots of patents and licensing agreements (including with AMD) and Apple wouldn't want to encumber themselves with that. Hence making their own GPUs and modems. For two, the M-series CPUs already have extensions which improve x86 emulation performance in Rosetta. For three, Rosetta is already slated for removal in a macOS version or two. Apple don't look backwards, they expect users and devs to move on with them after the transition period - like 32-bit code, PowerPC Rosetta, Classic environment. Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software because these are fast, efficient CPUs and any form of emulation will harm that. And dedicated SIP blocks would only confuse the market. For four, Boot Camp was a selling point when the Mac and OS X were still far behind Windows in terms of software support, so dual booting and virtualization was a selling point. Now many apps are cross-platform or web-based and Microsoft's strangehold on computing is reduced. A Mac running Windows was better for Apple than a Dell running Windows, but a Mac running macOS is what Apple wants - that's how they can keep in their ecosystem, charge you (and devs) for apps, and make you evangelical for their battery life. Five, Apple have never cared much about games. Yeah there are some classics (Marathon...) and the porting toolkit for Metal now, but with the Steam Deck and game streaming being so accessible, I see no reason why Apple would accept the previous 4 cons just to appeal slightly more to a gaming market that Apple don't target and that doesn't really target Apple. So people are probably downvoting (not me, I don't have enough karma and it wasn't a bad-faith comment!) because it's a far-fetched fantasy which goes directly against Apple's business style and would benefit almost no Mac users.
- naveen99 1y agoI don’t understand why intel doesn’t build a fab in Taiwan or another lower cost location ?
- rmah 1y agolack of skilled labor, probably
- naveen99 1y agoTaiwan surely has some poachable labor.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vessenes 1y agoNo state infrastructure available to protect them, among many other considerations.
- ac29 1y agoIntel's most advanced production Fab is in Ireland, which is higher income than Taiwan but much lower than the US.
- osnium123 1y agoIntel has announced that Intel 18A manufacturing will take place in Arizona. Salaries are a relatively small amount of the total costs of running a fab. https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/intel-unveils-panther-lake-architecture-first-ai-pc-platform-built-on-18a https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/intel-unveils-pa...
- faragon 1y agoWhy Apple don't just buy Intel? That would allow better vertical integration.
- walterbell 1y agoBuyer could not fire existing customers, as Broadcom did with VMware.
- etempleton 1y agoRisky. Apple loves to vertically integrate and they could certainly give a cash infusion, but right now they can bounce between TSMC, Intel and Samsung and probably get sweetheart deals at each because of their scale / the positive press from serving Apple as a customer.
- GeekyBear 1y agoApple doesn't buy manufacturing companies, however if you can make something they want, they have definitely been known to pay for a dedicated manufacturing line up front.
- cromka 1y agoGood luck with the EU OK-ing this
- osnium123 1y agoChina would also block this deal
- alwillis 1y ago> Why Apple don't just buy Intel? Apple doesn't need a fab. They bought P.A. Semi in 2008, which got them microprocessor design talent that lead to Apple Silicon. > That would allow better vertical integration. Apple already ships devices with CPUs, GPUs, NPU's (Neural Processing Unit), modem and wi-fi chipsets all designed by them. I'll also add the H2 audio processor in the AirPods. It's hard to get more vertically integrated than that. [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/11/02/pa-semi-looking-back https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/11/02/pa-semi-looking...
- drob518 1y agoThis is a good play for Intel. It lets them play both sides of the market.
- xnx 1y agoSource: https://x.com/mingchikuo/status/1994422001952555318 https://x.com/mingchikuo/status/1994422001952555318