Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

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Inferring from the video announce plus guessing:

Will they have a wide TDP range of designs? Yes. On feasibility, there are two major components to the cost - first is the engineering cost for design. You can bet that these costs are not massive; Apple has roughly $200 billion cash on hand right now. Most of the work will be scaled up as part of their overall design process.

The second cost component is the Non-recurring engineering to get a mask-set made for the chips. A 7nm start right now costs maybe in the range of $20mm? If the Mac Pro is required to stand on its own feet financially, perhaps that will push out timing / push up cost. On the other hand, if one considers the cost of the top end chip to be a marketing cost, it’s literally a rounding error.

GPU - Apple is going to have their own GPUs, and no longer worry about AMD and Nvidia. They’ll have complete control of the hardware and software stack and control their own destiny. I would be very surprised to see dual GPU options.

> wide TDP range of designs

Keep in mind that this doesn't imply a different chip design. TDP is primarily a function of intended application and cooling capacity, not chip tech.

That said, they've already demonstrated ability to do this with A12/A12X/A12Z, which are the same chip at different CPU/GPU core counts. Clock rates are not impacted except where thermal limitations (TDP) impose a limit.

Don't forget the S line of SoC's as well for the Apple Watch - which wiped the floor with the Qualcomm watch SoC.

200 billions may seem huge but at the same time the have 118 billions $ of debt as they use debt to pay dividend without moving money.

Without triggering tax obligations.

Every time stock is sold (whether Apple is the buyer or not), a "tax obligation" is triggered.

Which has nothing to do with why Apple took on debt to pay dividends.

If Apple took funds from a foreign subsidiary to pay shareholder dividends it would have to pay

1) Federal Corporate income tax of 20%. 2) CA state corporate income tax of 9%.

Then out of the 73% left over, the shareholder would pay state income tax + federal dividend tax. That means the shareholder ends up keeping between 50-60% of the funds Apple paid.

If Apple borrows the funds instead, it owes no federal or state corporate tax. The shareholder just needs to pay state income tax and federal dividend taxes, so after tax they end up with 70-85% of the funds Apple paid.

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