Why didn't Apple have Intel manufacture their chips?

[witeken]

In Aaron spink's opinion it is almost the only reason that Intel has struggled the crack into foundry market, not price or design rule restriction or anything like that. Its a brutal chicken and egg cycle to break out of.

It is the reason, this is old knowledge. (And BTW, you can be sure that price is a factor, and also getting your design from your current foundry to the next.)

http://semiengineering.com/one-on-one-with-intels-foundry-chief/ (2 yrs ago)

Rikhi: We started with a very narrow set of customers. Now, we are definitely past the initial stages. We are building up our capabilities to offer our services for a wider range of customers. We now have silicon flowing through the fab. We have design starts at the front end of the pipeline. So now, we have four years’ worth of activities and experience going from the beginning of the pipeline to the end of the pipeline. Now, our ability to offer technology for new customers is expanding. So, we are in the second stage of our growth in the foundry business.

SE: Does the platform for logic become more narrowly defined as you continue to scale?

Rikhi: On the contrary, we have an SoC offering in 14nm and 10nm. We also intend it for 7nm as well. We want to integrate just about everything. Obviously, the more you integrate on a chip, there are fringe elements that appear. They may not belong on the chip.

SE: Is that the analog portions of the SoC?

Rikhi: I remember having this discussion at 32nm. By the time 14nm appears, the people thought that the analog stuff will be off chip. But today, we have SerDes technology on 14nm. How did we make that possible? We have a highly digital architecture, which mixes digital and analog. We get that in the smallest die possible with good performance and power.

SE: How would you compare yourself to TSMC now?

Rikhi: They have the experience and wisdom of being in the industry for 30 years as a full service foundry. But our heart is in the right place. Customers are teaching us. And the ecosystem partners are teaching us. So we are learning very fast, but we don’t pretend to know how to spin services as well as they do. But on the technology side, there is no question. We have the best technology. For example, before and at 22nm, we had the best transistors, but not the best interconnects. We’ve changed that. At 14nm, we have an entire generation of new technology. So for power and performance, and the economic benefit of Moore’s Law, we are the ones to beat.

SE: Has it been more difficult to obtain foundry customers than previously thought?

Rikhi: Absolutely. There are people who thought all Intel had to do was to enter the business. And then, customers would come. In fact, there were those who thought people would beat our doors down and break them. And then, there were people who thought there was no way Intel is going to succeed in the foundry business, because of a number of concerns. For example, how can you trust Intel to obtain capacity and all of that kind of stuff? So you have both ends of the spectrum, but as it turns out, none of them are true. It’s somewhere in the middle. I get to talk to everybody because of the technology that is in our pocket, but I don’t get to walk away with contracts. It is far more than the technology we have to sell for the customers to actually make a switch. And that’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate and understand.

 

[ShintaiDK]

- Lower the price of Macs to reduce the Mac tax and use iOS to make inroads into the Enterprise market which has the potential to be huge.

Ye that's not happening. If you work in the enterprise market you know they scream on Apple to make an iPad "real" Pro as 2:1 with x86 and OSX. The iPad Pro IOS ended up as a joke and a collective facepalm.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I am indeed not aware of quantitative comparisons like mv/dec (but Intel's 14nm process is close to the silicon theorectical minimum of 60mv/dec with its 65 value) or other power/frequency things that are apples to apples. But we know that feature size is still important, and those are superior just like other characteristics (gate length, air gaps, fin pitch, novel subfin doping technique, variation).

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/ww...foundry/intel-14nm-iedm-2014-presentation.pdf

Don't focus so much on technical stuff. Let's suppose that even for very low power devices, Intel 14nm is far-and-away superior to TSMC 16nm in terms of performance/power. What is the cost like? Can a company get to market as quickly with Intel as they can with TSMC? Can customers trust Intel to put them first, even ahead of Intel's own internal needs?

There's just so much to "superiority" beyond density and electrical characteristics. Intel's 14nm is impressive and from what we're seeing with Kaby Lake 14nm+ is even more impressive. But there's just so much more to it than that.

 

[witeken]

Don't focus so much on technical stuff. Let's suppose that even for very low power devices, Intel 14nm is far-and-away superior to TSMC 16nm in terms of performance/power. What is the cost like? Can a company get to market as quickly with Intel as they can with TSMC? Can customers trust Intel to put them first, even ahead of Intel's own internal needs?

There's just so much to "superiority" beyond density and electrical characteristics. Intel's 14nm is impressive and from what we're seeing with Kaby Lake 14nm+ is even more impressive. But there's just so much more to it than that.

I would've answered your rhetoric questions, but you're obviously asking why QCOM, AAPL, etc. didn't go with Intel foundry, which I (and you) obviously don't know, so ask them. For all we know they might be planning to go on board at 10nm, or they (e.g. Apple) might have used Intel foundry as part of negatiation.