Intel Is Seeking an Investment from Apple as Part of Its Comeback Bid | Hacker News Reader

Intel Is Seeking an Investment from Apple as Part of Its Comeback Bid

bloomberg.com

30 pointsmfiguiere19 comments

Where's Microsoft? They have the most to lose if Intel goes under.

What is Microsoft losing? AMD is still selling x86 chips. There's ARM. They can port to RISC-V. OS isn't even their bread and butter anymore.

They’ve never successfully built up a non-x86 userbase on Windows.

An architecture switch where a lot of software won’t run well (or at all) is a big risk for them that people could start to go elsewhere in non-trivial numbers.

Apple, Linux, Chromebook.

Yes they have a compatibility layer for running x86 on ARM. They could make it for other archs. But that’s still a big effort and consumers may not trust.

I think at this point, Azure and their OpenAI partnership are enough to weather the transition to ARM. It is just software, and Apple has (TWICE) shown how to do it right.

That said, has anyone checked in with Lisa Su on this?

Apple has done it, but they’re not slavish to backwards compatibility like MS. They don’t have anywhere near as many games or random line of business apps, and I suspect their users are more loyal than much of the Windows base that just bought what was cheaper/most common.

As someone who has used an Intel mac, then moved up to a M3, please god no. Intel macs were some of the worst things Apple has ever made.

Most likely for the foundry business

I felt 2012 - 2015 Intel Macs were pretty decent: the first Retina MacBook Pro, the iMac 5K, for example. It definitely went down hill with the Touch Bar and the MacBook Pros with the Core i9 chips. Those seemed like they were constantly throttling, fans sounded like a jet engine...

IMHO that is because Intel wasn't delivering chips meeting the specs they promised. Once you dropped it into a system and put a thermal/cooling profile in, the new chip didn't really perform better than the old one.

On the lower end, Apple just stopped releasing updates because there was no useful advantage to new chips.

On the high end, Apple was fighting between their desire to have a machine pleasant to use, and one that would fire the fans full speed at boot to keep up maximum performance without thermal throttling.

Kinda? Apple was known to tune their ACPI tables pretty hard, it wasn't impossible for them to put a hard-limit of 70c like the other Wintel machines at the time. Instead they seemed to push the Turbo mode until you approached junction temp, which didn't seem like a smart idea for a mobile device. Especially those embarrassingly thin i9 workstations Apple tried shipping.

The behavior persists on Apple Silicon, it just gets there slower. Someone internally at Apple must have a vendetta against CPU throttling, I guess.

Heat transfer rates are higher when the difference in temperature is higher. So if the CPU temperature is below the maximum you're leaving some theoretical performance on the table. Someone at Apple has a hard on for performance data that's making them ignore real world consequences.

I don’t think that’s fair. The move to x86 was a huge step up from the PowerPC G5s. That said, the move to the M1 was even bigger, so I can relate to the sentiment.

China is taking Taiwan unless Xi randomly dies of a heart attack.

It’s safer to have an alternative to tsmc knowing this.

Intel has never sold their EULV nodes before. They're a "substitute" in the same way eating from the trash substitutes a McDonalds meal.

China has been going to take Taiwan for a long time now, hasn't.

They have finished construction on the largest field hospitals and civilian bunkers across the strait.

It’s part of official Xi CCP policy to acquire Taiwan.

Most experts put the move around 2027 when the next tranche of ships are finished.

You could at least do readers the justice of citing which policy you're referencing offhand (Chinese Dream 2049: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream)

Is this Tim Cook’s way of getting preferential treatment from the Trump administration?

It will be more than just Apple. Trump got in first. He'll arm twist the others to take token stakes and set up some working relationship. Nvidia doesn't need to take a $5B stake in Intel. Did Apple ever have a stake in TSMC? Whether or not this changes any of Intel's actual problems over the long term is a different matter.

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