The Apple-Intel-Samsung Ménage à Trois(mondaynote.com)

http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/05/13/the-apple-intel-samsung-menage-a-trois

1 comments

This article is missing a couple of facts:

First, Apple has been designing its own "Ax" series of ARM chips with its purchase of PA Semi, currently with the A5/A5X. If Apple switched to an Intel chip, they would no longer have the flexibility of a custom design or marketing claim to a custom chip in their product.

Second, though Apple contracts with Samsung to fabricate their ARM chips, they could presumably go to other companies to do the same thing. There have been rumors of a future partnership with TSMC. If Apple switched iOS to Intel's architecture, Apple would have much less flexibility with fabrication.

Third, switching CPU architectures means that your old software doesn't work immediately (we used to say "out of the box"). When Apple previously switched CPU architectures on the Mac, they had an emulator to allow running old apps, but this has a huge performance penalty that wouldn't fly on iOS: apps wouldn't be silky smooth on the latest product. The situation here is a bit different than with the Mac because developers sell directly through the App Store, but Apple would have to take a temporary hit to their huge app selection while developers recompile their apps, and some developers may not have the resources to do so (because the work was done via contract, for example). Perhaps static recompilation to retarget the architecture could be done by Apple for each app, but reading the EFF's copy of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, I don't see where Apple granted themselves the right to do this (correct me if I'm wrong).

To me, it makes more sense that Apple would want Intel to manufacture Ax ARM chips for them. But given that Intel has shown huge resistance to ARM (probably due to the lack of manufacturer lock-in), it's unlikely that they would partner with Apple to do this. The key advantage for Apple would be the use of Intel's cutting edge fabs, which would make their ARM chips the undisputed champions.