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On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business: the low power core cpu was started specifically to enable the MBA, as well
by polshaw 14y ago
On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business: the low power core cpu was started specifically to enable the MBA, as well as the focus on a powerful integrated graphics chip for laptop CPUs. Yes, you need to be a major player to have this kind of relationship, but the same goes for if you want to design your own arm CPUs.
Intel's plan continues to be to make up 30%+ of system cost-- but they don't do this by simply providing a powerful CPU-- they integrate more and more into the CPU silicon, and that is their mobile/atom strategy too (see digital baseband integration, etc). It is not abnormal however; battery/digitizer etc are all commodity parts now, screens are quickly getting there too, the SOC is the only area that is so loosely bounded in terms of it's improvement potential.
Things have rarely looked better for intels fabs either, they almost totally dominate the desktop/laptop/server space, and have a serious prospect for significant expansion for the first time in a long time. There may be a small decline in PC sales, but the overall $ spent on processing systems (ie add phones and tablets) is rising a lot more.
I do agree with your broad point that intel will have to be noticeably better to get higher revenues for their chips, though. But if they get atom onto their leading CPU process (as planned), as well as out-of-order, then they are very likely to achieve this.
- marshray 14y agoBut the point stands that Apple can't add instructions to x86 like they can their iOS devices. The emphasis on a low power x86 core may have been driven in the short term by a desire to win Apple's business, but power consumption and heat dissipation are (literally) forces of nature that have been around forever. The increasing desire to reduce datacenter costs and increase server density and mobile battery life are very long term trends.
- wmf 14y agoQualcomm has already integrated pretty much everything and their SoCs are cheap, so the idea that Intel can charge a higher price in exchange for having more features sounds unlikely.
- tjoff 14y ago"On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business: the low power core cpu was started specifically to enable the MBA, as well as the focus on a powerful integrated graphics chip for laptop CPUs." Um, since the CPUs you are talking about came out years before MBA came out that sounds more like Steve talking... Also, intel GPUs are the most commonly used in the (x86) world and has been for a long time (before apple even made products using x86 processors). How the idea or execution of including it in the CPU has anything to do with apple I haven't got a clue. I'd be more willing "blame" the performance arms race of integrated GPU solutions on AMD buying ATi.
- protomyth 14y ago"On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business" Since Apple has adopted Intel processors, Intel has removed NVIDIA's ability to build chipsets for Intel processors. Apple was using one of these chipsets when this happened. Given the choice between a newer NVIDIA chipset and Intel's integrated graphics, I would bet Apple would still be using NVIDIA.