Intel has 1,000 people working on chips for the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Intel has 1,000 people working on chips for the iPhone

venturebeat.com

50 pointshappyscrappy19 comments

"If all goes well, Intel may"

"will likely be the iPhone 7"

"sources don’t believe Apple has officially signed Intel as a supplier"

"it could be just the beginning of a much deeper Intel involvement in the iPhone"

So this article is basically rumor and speculation. The only factual thing about this article is that Intel is working on a SOC (no surprise) which they hope Apple will buy.

It's probably not the greatest bet either. Apple seems to be moving as much of their chip design in house. I'd bet many of these things will be on custom SOCs and Apple-designed chips a few years from now. Related: http://stevecheney.com/on-apples-incredible-platform-advanta...

Is Apple moving their chip design in-house, or just CPU design? Because the article is about the LTE modem and manufacturing.

The article has some pretty good details, and while speculative, second sourcing LTE modems would make a lot of sense, no? The comments seem to be missing the SIP[0] aspect of modern electronic device manufacturing which Apple and others are pursuing[1]... it allows for some "strange bedfellows" and would explain a joint TSMC / Intel solution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_in_package [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/hon-hai-loses-battle-to-control-...

This really reads like a computer generated text.

It's not for Apple, it's for Microsoft.

That's a heck of a bet for Intel to make considering Windows phone is 2% global market share and shrinking. Not trying to bash Windows phone either (I owned a WP7 device), it's just the reality that even MS is starting to come to grips with.

http://cdn.bgr.com/2015/04/computer-shipments-2015.png?w=624

intel needs a way out of the shrinking pc market. gonna be profitable for a long time, but the tablet/smartphone market is a pie so big establish a foothold is gonna be strategic, even if the r&d cost is high

(still article was mostly - but the writing on intel wanting mobile was on the wall for a long time )

also http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-details-new-processors-ai...

Intel is already out of the shrinking PC market. Servers are incredibly popular. Even cloud servers use Intel CPUs, and when people buy more cell phones, companies buy more servers. A strategic foothold for x86 might be out of the question now, even given Intel's deep pockets, but that doesn't mean that they can't manufacture ARMs on their 14nm process, and the investors know this.

Hell with a couple of billion phones out there... you better want a big piece of that market in this world. Whether those chips go in iPhone Android or whatever. They need to exist.

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