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Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal
- google_play_hn 5mo ago[flagged]
- alessandroberna 5mo ago?
- jdironman 5mo agoprobably someone testing their android hacker news client. maybe.
- torben-friis 5mo agoWasn't the whole apple silicon thing about Intel being unable to keep up? Is this maybe a way to expand the affordable neo line?
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoIt was about x64 being unable to keep up - independent of Intel’s Fab capabilities which have improved lately. Also, the NEO line uses cutting edge technology that is necessary for the iPhone SOC, so this is probably for other chips.
- mdasen 5mo ago> It was about x64 being unable to keep up - independent of Intel’s Fab capabilities which have improved lately. But the big reason x64 couldn't keep up was that Intel's fab capabilities were horrible. Intel got stuck and couldn't get smaller nodes out and competing fabs caught up and left Intel in the dust. Apple was able to ship 22nm Intel processors in Summer 2012 while their iPhone processors were 32nm that Fall and 28nm in Fall 2013. Spring 2015, Apple shipped 14nm Intel laptops and later that Fall 14/16nm iPhones. Competitors had caught up and soon TSMC started surpassing Intel. Yes, Intel's fab capabilities have improved lately, but Intel's fab failures were causing x64 to fall behind. If Intel had retained fab supremacy, x64 wouldn't have fallen behind. I think Apple still likes the idea of being able to build exactly the parts they want (so they can optimize for power, thermals, etc), but Intel fell behind because their fabs stopped being competitive.
- alwillis 5mo ago>> It was about x64 being unable to keep up - independent of Intel’s fab capabilities, which have improved lately. > But the big reason x64 couldn't keep up was that Intel's fab capabilities were horrible. Intel got stuck and couldn't get smaller nodes out, and competing fabs caught up and left Intel in the dust. It also was that Intel couldn’t execute reliably on their own roadmap, forcing Apple at the time to do extra engineering to incorporate Intel's chips. Apple sells a lot of laptops; Intel never got their act together regarding mobile processors for MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The 8-core Mac Pro used Intel Xeon 5500 series; at idle, it used 309 W; it used 9 fans for cooling [1]. It sounded like a jet engine when it was running. And while it was an elegant design for the time, they shouldn’t have needed to jump through these hoops. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102839
- wtallis 5mo ago> It also was that Intel couldn’t execute reliably on their own roadmap, Intel kept putting out delusional roadmaps that would assume their 10nm fab process was going to be ready for mass production in just another quarter or two. They spent years refusing to plan for 10nm to not be ready, so all their new architectures were unshippable and they had to resort to just using copy and paste on their 2015 CPU cores. Their fab fuck-up was hardly the only mistake they made in that era, but it was the biggest underlying cause of their problems.
- tambourine_man 5mo agoIntel has been deemed a national security asset. Essential infrastructure. The government (both current and previous administrations) is doing everything it can to make sure they do keep up, at the very least. And with enough money being thrown at it, they probably will.
- boplicity 5mo agoAlso keep in mind that none of the big chip purchasers (Apple, Nvidia, etc), want to depend on one supplier for their chips. There are huge incentives among them to encourage Intel's success. Nobody benefits if just one company controls the state of the art in chip manufacturing, and Intel is one of maybe two other companies positioned to have a chance at competing effectively with TSMC.
- aylmao 5mo agoI've always thought letting the free market decide everything is not an optimal strategy. Protecting sovereignty of key industries like this is a good example. What IMO is a bad strategy is the aversion to nationalization that exists in the USA. They buy billions worth of shares in key companies to inject capital during times of crisis, to later divest and refuse to be a player in industry. China's model is much more complex. There's state-owned companies, companies where the state is a major stake-holder, and private companies too. It seems to afford them more tools to push and steer industries as they see important. The USA is no stranger to this at smaller scales; airports are state run (at the municipal or state level). This rids them of the burden of profit, and allows them to be strategically use for the broader benefit when it makes sense. Some are profitable; state-run doesn't necessarily mean unprofitable. But some can written off as infrastructure investments that don't make money but make other industries in the region competitive. At some point this makes sense if you want to keep pushing forward; let's stop worrying too much about making money on X, because if X is a widely-available commodity, we can instead make money on Y and Z. I see it in Mexico too. Mexico's private healthcare is affordable and good because it has huge state-run healthcare system to compete with. State-provided healthcare isn't the best or fastest healthcare you can get, but it is free. This certainly puts competitive pressure on private healthcare companies, and in a way gives the Mexican government the best regulatory tool: the market itself. The Mexican government isn't trying to destroy private health, but via the state health enterprise it gains tools to steer and push the health industry in ways it may deem important. Looking at the state of EVs and the car industry, I think it's clear whatever the Chinese government did to incentivize EV innovation was more effective than the federal incentives the USA government provided. At one point the USA government had a 60% stake in General Motors [1]; meaning it was nationalized, before being privatized again by 2013. I just wonder what the USA could've done with that machinery; could they have offered a cheap EV, even if it's low quality, to push adoption, competitive pressure and get supply chains going? Could they have further commoditized certain parts to lower costs? Could they have strategically opened factories in certain locations to lower the risk and investment cost of future companies, and this way get the ball rolling on creating new auto-industry regions? We will never know, but we do know the USA's auto industry is now on the defense playing catch-up to China, and there seems to be little the USA government can do except placing tariffs and offering subsidies. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/09/government-sells-the-last-of-its-gm-stake-treasury.html https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/09/government-sells-the-last-of...
- lostlogin 5mo ago> maybe a way to expand the affordable neo line? It’s a good way to keep pumping the share price too.
- toast0 5mo agoIMHO, the big thing was the mismatch between what Apple wanted in a CPU and what Intel was prepared to offer the marketplace, and AMD wasn't different enough to matter. Intel/AMD chips are designed with one thermal target for acceptable computing and a second, much higher target if you want to compute at the highest throughput continuously. Apple did not provide the highest thermal capaicity and suffered when comparing similar cpu against another OEM. With Apple silicon, the cpu is designed around the thermal solution Apple is willing to provide. A lower power target leads to a lower clockspeed target leads to different design tradeoffs than Intel/AMD where flagship designs must clock to the moon. You can see similar benefits for the lower targets in AMD's ZenC cores. But ZenC wasn't available, and Apple probably wouldn't want to be running laptops with only ZenC when you could get a regular Zen laptop from someone else. Apple benefits from avoiding apples to apples comparisons. Likely Apple won't lean too heavily on Intel fab to start with. Let them do processors for value products and see where it goes, but always plan for fab agility. At least until Intel fab becomes a reliable partner.
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoPaywall
- xiaoyu2006 5mo agoReuters usually don't have paywalls, and neither I am experience one here.
- addaon 5mo agoI believe that both of those statements are true. Nonetheless, I and other posters are experiencing one here and can't read the article. Your valid anecdote does not help us.
- JoshTriplett 5mo agoSeemed to load just fine here.
- Simulacra 5mo agoI am also getting a paywall. Subscribe to read more.
- SyneRyder 5mo ago+1 for me in Australia, but it's due to using an ad blocker: --- Support trusted, global news. Advertising on our site enables us to bring you timely, unbiased news from around the world. Please consider supporting us by disabling your adblocker or subscribing to Reuters.com: Allow ads to support trusted, global news Subscribe to support trusted, global news VRM by Admiral --- For what it's worth, Reader Mode in Firefox displays the article text anyway.
- xnx 5mo agoWould love to see this mean the return of Bootcamp, but that's probably gone forever.
- vsgherzi 5mo agoBoot camp is a windows problem. This can be done today on apple silicon but Microsoft dosent want to go through the effort to support it.
- bpoyner 5mo agoI imagine it would be a big lift. Asahi linux is managing through reverse engineering the hardware support, without any official documentation. Even with official documentation it would be a significant change from other aarch64 hardware.
- dwaite 5mo agoI'm curious why I would want to dual boot Windows when there's a perfectly good hypervisor and paravirtualization built into macOS? Arm-based windows support via Parallels does work, but AFAICT there's no official way to buy a Windows license due to a Microsoft/Qualcomm partnership.
- xnx 5mo agoNo RAM, CPU, or disk overhead.
- evancox100 5mo agoYou can buy an ARM Windows license for parallels on Mac now. It works quite well. I think WoA used to be exclusive to Qualcomm, but that hasn’t been true for at least a couple years, maybe longer.
- bigyabai 5mo agoTechnically speaking, Bootcamp is an iBoot problem. Apple stopped shipping Macs with firmware UEFI which breaks 99% of generic OS installers out of the box. Microsoft is pretty justified not wanting to support that, versus UEFI on OG Bootcamp. The majority of Linux distros don't ship image support for iBoot either.
- riffic 5mo agoanother triumph for x86
- ion1c 5mo agoThis is a fab deal, nothing to do with x86
- chris_money202 5mo agoTechnically, but the money doing this will indirectly help Intel's chip line through experience and increased fab quality
- 01100011 5mo ago> The Journal report said that the U.S. government, which became Intel's largest shareholder last year under a deal with its CEO Lip-Bu Tan, played a major role in bringing Apple to the negotiating table. Ah, so this wasn't a decision Apple freely made based on technical merits. Instead it sounds more like big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme. My guess, Apple drags their feet for a couple years and bails after Trump leaves office(or is significantly weakened after the midterms).
- oaiey 5mo agoOr use it to de-risk their supply chain.
- 01100011 5mo agoThen why did the USG need to get involved to bring AAPL to the table? Sure, supply chain redundancy is good, but that wasn't enough to get AAPL interested before.
- tester756 5mo ago>big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme. What's wrong with US gov caring about supply chain and manufacturing capability of the most needed technology right there - on American soil? It is in US' interest to be able to produce such complex tech locally
- 5mo ago
- gavinsyancey 5mo agoIs this Intel Foundry Services fabbing apple-designed chips, or Apple using Intel-designed chips in their products? I would assume the former but don't see where in the article it says either way.
- tantalor 5mo agoApple designed chips, manufactured by Intel.
- tambourine_man 5mo agoFormer, for sure
- saltcured 5mo agoHow many more economic cycles until Intel is asking Apple to fab Intel-designed chips?
- wtallis 5mo agoEven if we make the not-particularly-reasonable assumption that Apple would want to own a fab, and the wildly unreasonable assumption that they would accept any outside customers for the fab: building a fab business from scratch to something competitive would take on the order of a decade or more even for a company with Apple's resources. And if Apple bought somebody else's fab business, it seems most likely that it would be Intel's and there would no longer be an Intel do design chips that would be in search of a foundry. (Intel has the only relevant logic fab business that could plausibly end up getting sold off to the likes of Apple.)
- saltcured 5mo agoYes, I suppose I was imagining the weird transition like AMD did when they split off Global Foundries. Imagine the remaining Intel being a chip designer like AMD. For someone of my age, it seems both incomprehensible and somehow inevitable. Crazy leadership choices seem to be happening so often in recent years. Honestly, I found it hard to understand why they abandoned RAM and solid state memory fab sectors too. With all the national security spending by DoD, DoE, etc., I would have thought there is room for some US-based business to remain, even if some of the mass consumer stuff has been lost to low margin international competitors.
- whynotminot 5mo agoBig deal, smart for all parties, really. Apple standards will make Intel step up and become a better foundry partner. Apple will gain increasingly needed diversification. US supply chain gets a boost. Should be fine for TSMC in the short to medium term. Apple not going to risk actual mainline iPhone SoC on Intel any time soon, so lion share of TSMC Apple revenue will be fine.
- 9cb14c1ec0 5mo ago> Apple not going to risk actual mainline iPhone SoC on Intel any time soon Not to mention that Intel does not and will not any time in the next decade have the capacity for a product of that quantity.
- benced 5mo agoNext decade seems possibly false - if Intel starts getting deals and commitments now, it takes them about half a decade to build a fab. Agree it seems unlikely though.
- aurareturn 5mo agoIntel doesn't even have enough capacity right now to make enough Xeon chips. CPU demand is absolutely booming but their Intel 18A and 3 nodes don't have great yields.
- aurareturn 5mo agoASML is one of the bigger bottlenecks I hear. They're fully booked out years in advance so even if Intel wants to build many more fabs, they can't. There was a recent interview with Dylan Patel and he explained it pretty well. Basically, there are tiers of risks and how "AGI pilled" each tier is. The bottlenecks and supply constraints get worse and worse as you down down the tiers. Tier 1: OpenAI/Anthropic - extremely AGI pilled and think it's a sure thing. They want all layers underneath to prepare to make as many chips as possible and go all in. Tier 2: Nvidia/AMD/Broadcom - very bullish but doesn't think AGI is a sure thing Tier 3: TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Intel, Sandisk, Micron - bullish but if they're wrong and overbuild, they can actually go bankrupt. Each fab can cost tens of billions. An N2 fab is estimated to be $30b each. Tier 4: Every supplier to T3 such as ASML, Applied Materials, other fab machines and suppliers - Less bullish, may even see this as just a super cycle rather than a permanent increase in demand so they're less inclined to take too many risks to scale up
- rvz 5mo agoIntel was not "allowed" to fail. (But Spirit Airlines was) and now the stock is at an all time high. It was only 9 months ago [0] that almost everyone here was bearish (not me [1]). Now it is the opposite. Next we will here some folks wishing they should have joined Intel when it was $20 a share. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675965 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44676641
- wmf 5mo ago18A was Schrodinger's fab: we didn't know if it was alive or dead. Now we know it's alive.
- j_walter 5mo agoSome people also thought Gamestop was a good deal at $400 after 50x-ing...but when you look at fundementals, earnings and actual projected growth and not just the hype, you see the stock for what it really is. At $20 it was a good deal because of the possibilities of long term success (which we haven't seen any actual evidence of yet), but at $125 it is way overpriced. Another way to look at it. TSMC profit in 2025 was equivalent to Intel revenue (both about $55B), but Intel made zero dollars profit, yet somehow their market cap is now half of TSMCs.
- lostlogin 5mo agoTrump talking up intel was the time to buy. But when is the time to get out? r/wallstreetbets has been amusing to watch.
- Detrytus 5mo agoI actually owned quite a bit of Intel stock bought at $19, but was forced to sell it. Then I bough some for $45 last year, and sold couple weeks ago for $60, just a day or two before it took off. Lucky me....
- ryandrake 5mo agoIntel is the Chrysler of chipmaking. It's only alive because the USA strategically needs a USA company to be able to make and design at least some kind of chips.
- jauntywundrkind 5mo agoIntel seems far & away the best at chiplet right now. Foveros, EIMB, etc, and possible Z-Angle next... Intel seems way ahead. They're trying to get to 12x reticle size in 2028, and doing it super smartly (eimb). https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mldkuos6hk2j https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mld... That alone is a strong reason for Apple to show up. Apple has some pretty wild patents on chiplet System-on-Chip designs! https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mi7dgrtt3k2g https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mi7...
- topspin 5mo agoYes, Intel is actually competitive again. Between working backside power, the most advanced chiplet packaging tech going, 18A yields steadily improving, and other good news, Intel is really on plane. Now they've landed both SpaceX and Apple. It's good to see. Guess they were worth saving. I do hope their abandonment of discrete desktop GPU is temporary.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoThis is really nice for competition in semiconductor manufacturing. The TSMC quasi-monopoly (with Samsung fabs slightly lagging) and limited capacity is not good for the market. Owning leading edge fabs might also help Intel to keep up the competition in the x86 market. Intel is the underdog now!
- oezi 5mo agoHow does Global Foundries fit into this? Are they still a thing?
- modeless 5mo agoThey stopped pursuing cutting edge fabrication processes many years ago. Always seemed like a short sighted business decision to me.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoI read about it at the time. Apparently, every new node was twice as expensive to develop as the previous one, which killed off the smaller competitors one by one. Even today, I find it hard to tell whether Globalfoundries really made a mistake. They get to cash out on their existing fabs and a bit of sustaining innovation for a long time instead of potentially killing themselves swiftly by trying and failing to keep up with the leading edge.
- modeless 5mo agoConsidering the market cap of their competitors who kept going it seems foolish to have given up entirely.
- lizknope 5mo agoThere are no details in the article. It is probably a second source deal for a popular chip or a support chip in an older process node like a power converter.
- aurareturn 5mo agoI'm guessing lower volume, less important chips like for the Watch, TV, entry level iPads, possibly a few Macs.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoAh yes the classic pump. Has a 3x parabolic move ever maintained price over extended periods of time?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- NoSalt 5mo agoWhat year is this? What happened to the M1, M2, ... MN chips of Apple's? Is Apple going to go with Motorola after Intel??? Obviously I couldn't read the article due to it being paywalled.
- Bengalilol 5mo agoPardon my lack of faith but ... this article is clueless. No information whatsoever. Except: > The Journal report said the U.S. government, which became Intel's largest shareholder last year under a deal with its CEO Lip-Bu Tan, played a major role in bringing Apple to the negotiating table. ... smells what it smells.
- bigyabai 5mo agoI'm shocked to see people reason around "why Apple wants this" when the article is pointing right towards coercion. Follow the money, the rest is amateur hour.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agohow do you get to the content? I keep getting a 401 and a message to "enable JS and disable any ad blocker" even though JavaScript(tm) is enabled and I don't have an ad blocker. Do you have to use Safari or Edge or something?
- IsTom 5mo agoWell, I'm using uBlock Origin on Firefox and can see the content just fine. So maybe that's the way.
- _diyar 5mo agoHere’s my guess as to Apple's reasoning: They like to dominate suppliers, but TSMC is in such high demand that they’re on equal footing now. Going into bed with Intel gives them the chance to set strict terms again.
- brookst 5mo agoCertainly an aspect; would you rather negotiate with a supplier who has more power, or less power? But it’s likely not a one-dimensional decision. Supply chain diversification, China / Taiwan, Intel having established US fabs, on and on. Seems like a wise decision in every way.
- aurareturn 5mo agoGetting another supplier certainly makes negotiations easier but I doubt it's the main reason. The main reason is that TSMC simply does not have enough wafers no matter how much money Apple throws at them. TSMC is fully booked in 2026 and well into 2027 from reports. It's not clear if it's going to get better either. It could get worse in terms of supply.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoFor what it’s worth I thought Intel was down and out and on the decline, but that is not the case 18A is more advanced and more performant than TSMC’s N2- which are both foundary’s most advanced chips. The main problem Intel has is scaling. It just cannot provide the volume right now. That seems like a much more tractable problem, especially with 14 A on the horizon. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intels-18a-and-tsmcs-n2-process-nodes-compared-intel-is-faster-but-tsmc-is-denser https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intels-18a-and-ts...
- harywilke 5mo ago"In general, we want to and have been helping Intel," the official said, adding the effort was not because of the equity stake in Intel, but because the company is a major U.S. semiconductor producer. "We have been trying to drum up business for Intel." -dystopian
- deferredgrant 5mo ago[flagged]
- retired_account 5mo agoThis might explain why Apple has so many positions open at their Beaverton office, which coincidentally is not too far from ASML and Intel.
- 2001zhaozhao 5mo ago2010: Intel silicon 2020: Apple Silicon 2030: Intel Apple Silicon
- naveen99 5mo agoI thought even intel was using tsmc fabs for their own chips. Usa just needs to annex Taiwan and South Korea or create a new Taiwan / new sk in Arizona and bring half the Taiwan population here. Kind of like Israel and Cuba.