Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal

Re:Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal by wtallis on Friday May 08, 2026 @02:47PM (#48067136)

Even 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.)

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Re:Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal by saltcured on Friday May 08, 2026 @02:58PM (#48067260)

Yes, 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.

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Re:Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal by Melatonic on Friday May 08, 2026 @04:01PM (#48067989)

They already spun off Intel vs Intel Foundry into separate companies awhile back

Intel was in ram and solid state for a bit but didnt stick with it. Optane was a huge flop and they use different manufacturing techniques vs CPUs. Plus Micron is one of the biggest dram manufacturers and US based.

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Re:Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal by throwaway173738 on Friday May 08, 2026 @03:31PM (#48067645)

They wanted to focus resources on the very profitable top end of the market and leave the low-margin commodity business to competitors. If you repeat that cycle enough eventually you just stop competing with anyone because you’ve fired everyone who has the capacity to do that. Then it’s only a matter of time before you get eaten for lunch.

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Re:Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal by Someone on Friday May 08, 2026 @03:15PM (#48067450)

> 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

Isn’t running a fab only while it makes top of the line chips a bad idea because you can still make good money from it in later years?

If so, I think they, _if_ they ever want to own a fab (unlikely, IMO), they’ll want to accept outside customers for it when it has stopped being best-in-the-world.

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