Apple and Intel Rumored to Partner on Mac Chips
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Apple may have just been looking to apply pricing pressure.
> TSMC has finalized the pricing for its upcoming 2nm process, setting the wafer price at around $30,000. This marks a 10%–20% increase compared with the 3nm process average of $25,000–$27,000, lower than earlier market speculation of a 50% hike.
https://technode.com/2025/10/09/tsmc-sets-2nm-wafer-price-at...
Even if TSMC wasn't going to tighten the screws, it makes sense that Apple would be talking to Intel since Apple abhors single-source external dependencies. Plus, it gives them brownie points with our Grifter In Chief. https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
Apple previously dual sourced SOCs from both TSMC and Samsung, before dropping Samsung.
The performance and power efficiency has to be there.
If Intel can get good yields and performance/power efficiency from their new process node, then it can be worth the added complexity.
It fits perfectly with Apples sucking up to Trump too.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...
It’s interesting how open the corruption is from mega corporate American leaders, who don’t seem to hold to any principles.
Not just even with Trump. Accuse iCloud in China of being backdoored and someone will step in and demand "proof"
Apple gets a weird "free pass" on far too much
Apple doesn't need a fab. They bought P.A. Semi in 2008, which got them microprocessor design talent that lead to Apple Silicon.
> That would allow better vertical integration.
Apple already ships devices with CPUs, GPUs, NPU's (Neural Processing Unit), modem and wi-fi chipsets all designed by them. I'll also add the H2 audio processor in the AirPods.
It's hard to get more vertically integrated than that.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/11/02/pa-semi-looking...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-...
They don't. Apple has an Architecture License for ARM, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
If you're referring to TSMC - it shouldn't be too much of a problem for Apple to go and contract Samsung instead, at least assuming Samsung can keep up the yield. Intel isn't a competitor to either TSMC or Samsung, their fab process is years behind.
TSMC is ahead, as usual, but Intel is closer than Samsung (in this specific case).
Looks like Samsung is actually closer to production than Intel 18A which is still having issues with yields.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/samsungs-nex...
That being said, take it however you like. Apple is talking to Intel to make their deal with TSMC more favorable. They could have done the same with Samsung. Either way, TSMC will still be fabbing (at least a good chunk of) their 2nm chips.
It's certainly in Apple (and every company that requires a leading-edge fab)'s interest to try and keep Intel competitive with TSMC and Samsung. 3 companies is already too few for a truly competitive market. And 2 is worse.
I'd argue it's also in everyone's interest to have some redundancy in the chip fabrication supply chain (esp. given the geopolitical situation in Taiwan). It would already be catastrophic if TSMC's production was disrupted for any reason. It would be even more catastrophic if there was no Intel.
Unfortunately, I also can't see any government willing to put the money on the table to establish a third party from scratch. All that seems to be available is handouts for TSMC to construct a fab in Arizona, and even that was widely criticized.
Probably. And I suspect it will happen. Chips are crucial, and the governments know it.
Mind you, Apple also has large sums of money available (I suspect more than they know what to do with). So some of that going towards propping up Intel may be no bad thing.
> Unfortunately, I also can't see any government willing to put the money on the table to establish a third party from scratch.
I believe the Chinese government is in the process of doing this with SMIC. It seems likely that they will be competitive before too long.
I keep hearing SMIC has allllllmost caught up, of course…
> In 1991, scientists at Bell Labs published a paper demonstrating the possibility of using a wavelength of 13.8 nm for the so-called soft X-ray projection lithography.[4]
> To address the challenge of EUV lithography, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories were funded in the 1990s to perform basic research into the technical obstacles. The results of this successful effort were disseminated via a public/private partnership Cooperative R&D Agreement (CRADA).[3]
Is it? I've read that Intel's newest process is closer to TSMC N3 than N2, but surely it's not years behind Samsung? I think the biggest problem for Intel right now is acquiring customers and learning how to work with them (but the new CEO should be the right person to do that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process#3_nm_process_node...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process#2_nm_process_node...
https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/intel-unveils-pa...
Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea? Was Boot Camp really that unpopular? I always enjoyed it -- especially for gaming. Sure, laptops weren't ideal, but even then the same games ran noticeably better on Windows than on macOS.
You wouldn't enjoy it because it has an Apple GPU and most of the appeal in a Windows PC is the completely different Nvidia GPU.
For one, Intel's x86 IP is covered by lots of patents and licensing agreements (including with AMD) and Apple wouldn't want to encumber themselves with that. Hence making their own GPUs and modems.
For two, the M-series CPUs already have extensions which improve x86 emulation performance in Rosetta.
For three, Rosetta is already slated for removal in a macOS version or two. Apple don't look backwards, they expect users and devs to move on with them after the transition period - like 32-bit code, PowerPC Rosetta, Classic environment.
Even if Rosetta wasn't being removed, everyone should still want native ARM software because these are fast, efficient CPUs and any form of emulation will harm that. And dedicated SIP blocks would only confuse the market.
For four, Boot Camp was a selling point when the Mac and OS X were still far behind Windows in terms of software support, so dual booting and virtualization was a selling point. Now many apps are cross-platform or web-based and Microsoft's strangehold on computing is reduced. A Mac running Windows was better for Apple than a Dell running Windows, but a Mac running macOS is what Apple wants - that's how they can keep in their ecosystem, charge you (and devs) for apps, and make you evangelical for their battery life.
Five, Apple have never cared much about games. Yeah there are some classics (Marathon...) and the porting toolkit for Metal now, but with the Steam Deck and game streaming being so accessible, I see no reason why Apple would accept the previous 4 cons just to appeal slightly more to a gaming market that Apple don't target and that doesn't really target Apple.
So people are probably downvoting (not me, I don't have enough karma and it wasn't a bad-faith comment!) because it's a far-fetched fantasy which goes directly against Apple's business style and would benefit almost no Mac users.
I think this is seriously flawed logic, and part of why I don't daily a Mac anymore. As a user, I have zero leverage in porting 90% of the stuff I own to the New Hotness. Yes, that includes video games. But it also includes BBEdit and Sublime and Git Tower and dozens of other Mac apps I paid for and can't easily use anymore. That is insulting - I should be allowed to use these apps if the hardware supports it. No software nanny should have the right to tell me playtime is over.
There's no point paying for premium software that my laptop OEM uses as leverage against their own developers. I'm not going to be complicit in it even if emulation "harms" the performance. It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously or hell, even support Windows. They are a trillion dollar company, Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
The second half I agree with. Apple has "their vision" of what computing should be, and you need to be ride or die with that vision. Including application deprecation, unrepairable hardware, and artificial locks to make sure you're not misbehaving. That doesn't work for a lot of people, and was something I had to accept when I bought a Macbook after a decade away from the ecosystem (it helps that I now have an army of ThinkPads, a homelab, and a gaming PC.) But if you don't want to pay lots of money to visit Apple Disneyland on their terms, no one can reasonably blame you.
Sadly, Microsoft has enshittified Windows to the point that I jumped off - that 30 year backwards compatibility isn't worth the spying and advertising (LTSC helps, but not enough) and the Linux/BSD world expect binaries to be recompiled to the point that people joke that Win32 via WINE is the Linux stable ABI.
Everything has trade offs or things that benefit the business much more than the users.
Those apps all run on current Macs today--but you do need to upgrade to a current version.
Nobody should expect BBEdit 6.5 that shipped on PPC Macs in the early 2000s to run on a M4 MacBook Air.
> It's not unviable for Apple to implement UEFI, take Rosetta seriously, or, hell, even support Windows.
Apple stated it during the PPC to Intel transition and again with the Intel to ARM transition: Rosetta is a bridge technology for developers until they ship native versions of their applications. It's not a long-term solution.
Microsoft could make a deal to run ARM-based Windows on Apple Silicon hardware if they wanted to.
> They are a trillion-dollar company; Apple could launch a satellite into fucking orbit if you gave them enough time. They simply don't want to.
You're arguing against yourself: obviously, Apple's market cap is $4.16 trillion and has shipped over 400 million Macs since its introduction; it's hard to argue their strategy is "wrong" and hasn't been wildly successful.
No successful modern company has been declared dead or beleaguered more times than Apple has.
Good explanation.
I just liked that I could re-boot my MacBook Pro into "Game Mode" back when there was an Intel chip. I liked that about Bootcamp.
I played Marathon back in the day. Ha. It was a great game, and actually had a really good plot... most video games at the time didn't (especially not other FPSs).
Escape Velocity was another great Mac game from the past. And while Maelstrom wasn't really original, it was well-executed. I don't think there was any sort of PC version of either of those.
Spectre (the first FPS I remember playing), Bolo (the first multi-player network game I remember playing), Lemmings, Myst, Dark Castle, Load Runner... all amazing classic games that were Mac-first if not Mac-only. (=
Edit: Bolo may not have been Mac-first... but that's where I played it. Ha.
Rosetta is pretty damn fine as-is, and yet Apple is removing it, because they don't care for supporting anything older than 7 years.
Which is pretty hypocritical of them, touting gaming on Macs is good now, yet throwing 90% of the remaining game library (after killing off i386).
> Getting a lot of down-votes for this... why are people so down on the idea?
People mistake "downvote" for "disagree". You should only downvote a comment when it doesn't contribute anything to the discussion. If you disagree - you can argue, or just move on.
Watching a company at that scale completely lose its own plot is depressing. Did they replace Cook with an LLM that compacted its context one too many times?
Edit: This is a bad look for intel too. How are Apple store employees/nerds going to explain this product line bifurcation? “This low end Apple gizmo is a hot mess because it has Intel Inside. Also, it’s $50 more than last year. MAGA!”
https://www.techspot.com/news/106782-intel-18a-found-faster-...
Unless Apple is going to add active cooling or something to the Air, iPad and iPhone, I’d expect more thermal throttling on the intel chips (though the difference isn’t as stark as I assumed — it looks like Intel closed the gap a bit with 18a).
Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.
TSMC has even been cutting Apple special terms they don't give others:
> every time TSMC introduces a major upgrade, called an advanced process node, to its chipmaking, the defect rates of the dies stay relatively high until it can iron out the kinks. For 3 nm, the most cutting-edge node launching this year, the yield on wafers has recently been in the range of 70% to 80%, according to analysts, as well as one person with direct knowledge of the process.
That number would be a tough pill to swallow for TSMC’s customers, which typically pay for the wafer and all of the dies on it—including the bad ones. But in a break from standard practice, the Taiwanese manufacturer has only been charging Apple for dies that work—“known good dies,” in industry parlance—these people said.
Novelty applications like "performance smartphone hardware" will have to wait on the sidelines. The datacenter needs it more than Apple or Qualcomm, and they've brought the beaucoup bucks to prove it.
A quarter of your revenue isn't a "novelty".
> Apple is by far TSMC’s largest customer, accounting for 23% of the Taiwanese chipmaker’s almost $72 billion in revenue in 2022.
You don't throw away a long term partner over short term AI bubble gains if you intend to be a long term business.
Apple is most certainly not being thrown away, merely asked to compete at the market price if they want the latest node. Anything else is wasted money from TSMC's perspective, they still make legacy nodes Apple can perfectly well use for the iPhone if they want to save cash.
The way Apple already does:
> The investment includes “a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona,” according to Apple’s February announcement. The plan is to double Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion, with TSMC Arizona a primary beneficiary.
https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-...
They aren't going to throw away a long term partner for short term gains.
Kissing ass gets you in the door with TSMC, but it doesn't protect you from other people outbidding the product you want.
No, but being a long term partner gets you preferential treatment.
TSMC has literally been cutting Apple special lower pricing deals while signaling that given Nvidia's extravagant margins, they expect them to pay more per wafer than a normal customer.
> TSMC hints at price increase for Nvidia as response to its booming AI hardware business
https://www.techspot.com/news/103325-tsmc-hints-increasing-c...
> "TSMC's contribution to the world and the tech industry is under-represented by its financial results." Huang added that "raising prices is consistent with the value they deliver. I'm very happy to see them succeed."
If Nvidia is willing to pay up front to increase TSMC's production capacity, then they get wafers out of that new production capacity.
And they objectively do. In 2019 Apple had TSMC 5nm all to themselves; now they're fighting with Nvidia for capacity. Nevermind the rumor that Apple is sampling Intel Foundry Services, the mere fact that there is TSMC 2nm and 3nm capacity Apple is unwilling to buy is proof that their agreement is limited.
TSMC's capacity is not fixed.
> now they're fighting with Nvidia for capacity.
TSMC has literally been raising prices for Nvidia while lowering them for Apple.
I really doubt most Apple customers care. A few do, but they've long been the minority.
Currently, for MacBooks, the answer is “the small one doesn’t have a fan, so for sustained work like games or iMovie it is slower. However, it is smaller, lighter, quieter and cheaper”.
Are their egos supposed to feel the performance hit? Is there some cabal of Taiwanese extremists propping up the Mac market?
'Kuo said Apple plans to utilize Intel's 18A process, which is the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America."'
M5 uses a 3nm process
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-3nm-update-...
but Intel is proposing using their fab configured for the "earliest available sub-2nm advanced node manufactured in North America", according to the article (and from searching outside).
This is exactly what Google did when their Pixel SOCs were fabbed by Samsung.
Performance and power efficiency were both substandard compared to TSMC but the chips were cheaper.