One thing that is particularly under-appreciated is that Apple have pulled off a textbook disruption play against Intel; its supposed to be a small scrappy new company that disrupts the slow behemoth incumbent but in this case one of the biggest companies in the world has just executed it perfectly.
In this case of course having multiple products to graduate their own silicon through, and enough cash to design and build a chip, require you to be a huge company. But it shows strategic excellence and a long-term planning horizon to pull this off.
(Note I’m using the original strict definition of Disruption from Christensen, not the hand-wavey TechCrunch slogan.)
Odd that this article suggests that Intel ignored a new technology until it was too late in the Apple case, when the article that they link to back that claim argues for the other style of disruption---low-end product eventually claws up market share and performance to compete with the high-end.
The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic disruption from the low end.
The classic disruption story is clearly important here as is the pattern of recent failings by Intel. There have been other factors though that contribute to a more complex story:
- The availability of third party IP (Arm CPUs and originally Imagination GPUs) and manufacturing (Samsung and TSMC) that have allowed Apple to pick and mix to build its own SoCs.
- The fact that Arm has clearly been much more focused on power efficiency which might mean it has IP which Intel can't access (speculating here but we have big.LITTLE).
- Possibly the most importantly, the the benefits that Apple gets from being able own the whole stack and design SoCs that precisely match its needs.
As a result I'm a bit sceptical about whether Intel would have got Apple's mobile business long term given that market's eventual structure: the advantages of Apple's current approach are just too great.
Just sheer force of will. Intel has the engineering talent, the experience, the motivation and the capital. If they can't do it, who can? Apple has a lot to prove here, and so far all they've achieved is purchasing a few smaller chip design firms and managing to adapt existing ARM cores for their own SoCs. They have a long way to go to be able to be competitive in this area. The one thing going for them is that they have the capital to burn, and I can't think of a better way to use it.
I guess it's not black magic apple is doing right here. From my experience with big companies, Intel just got buried in its processes, approvals, middle-management etc.pp.; they still got the talent, and in the past years there wasn't any serious competitor to them.
The dual wake-up call from AMD and from Apple (ARM), combined with the money Intel has in its pocket will have a serious influence on the cpu market. Unsure if they'll come out ahead, but it will get interesting and probably cheaper, not only for consumers.
This is just bad all around. Not just for intel, but for the entire industry. I always prefer companies doing well because their products are successful, not because their competitors fall down.
More and more, Apple's timing on their switch to in-house ARM designs seems perfectly timed.
I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs?
Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has 200 billion dollars laying around.
Why would you be surprised? Apple's chip design team is the best in the entire industry, funded by a virtually infinite bankroll and with a razor focus on only developing chips for Apple's products; so microcode to drivers can be intimately optimized like a gaming console.
The access to iOS and macOS means that they can profile every single app everyone runs and improve real-world performance, and they do.
If you are a company that supplies anything (software or hardware) to Apple or Amazon, and you are operating on >20% gross margins, Apple and Amazon will destroy you, and destroy your margins. You have to continuously innovate and can't just relax and chill and collect your margins, like Intel has been doing for the past 5 years, milking their advantage that has evaporated.
Other than the modem, I don't think there's a component on the latest iPhones that has more than 20% margins for the supplier. Apple is ruthless. So is Amazon, when it comes to fulfilment.
Apple is the most valuable public company in the world. They have been making their own SoCs for the iPhone for over a decade. Their internal-consumption focus along with the bankroll of the world's most valuable corporation means that they can make the best chips. Intel's market cap is just 1/8th of Apple.
Intel chips have basically stagnated for about 5 years and they abused their monopoly and market leader positioning by offering marginal improvements each year in order to protect margins, as well as fab shrink problems that insiders describe as coming from culture not dissimilar to Boeing; just with less lives at stake.
In the meantime, competitor foundries have caught up, and exceed Intel's ability to ship in volume. ARM obviously is eyeing the desktop, but more critically server market so the latest ARM IP is geared towards higher performance computing, quite well I may say.
State of the art fab + state of the art processor IP = state of the art processor. Not a huge surprise :)
Apple outsourced chips to IBM (PowerPC) for a long time and floundered all the while. They went into the game themselves w/ the PA Semi acquisition and now they have Apple Silicon to show for it.
“ You would be right to say that Intel couldn’t make the M1. It’s not because Intel’s fabs are struggling or Apple has found tricks no one else in the world knows about. It’s because Apple controls the entire software stack and therefore knows what they need on the chip. Intel caters to the entire market (one the M1 just noticeably shrunk) with myriad integrators, workloads, and users, and each has different concerns and priorities making accelerated algorithm blocks useless to some and not-fast-enough for others.”
This is an important point. It applies up and down the stack for everything Apple does.
The people who suggest breaking up Apple are correct that it would destroy them, by forcing them to use inefficient generic components at every level.
If we want competition against Apple, the way to get there is not by hobbling them with the inefficiency of the old paradigm.
It’s by the rest of the industry figuring out how to collaborate on delivering similar gains without vertical integration.
Check the parent article that explains it well. Apple didn’t defy common comp arch wisdom... they applied it.
The reason why is hard for Intel/AMD to do the same is not the lack of engineering geniuses (I’m sure they have plenty), but the support for a legacy ISA, and a particular business model.
What Apple defies is common business survival instincts: why spent so much in RD of a chip if there are market leaders that are impossible to beat? The answer seems to be obvious now... but probably it wasn’t obvious when Apple acquired PA Semi in 2008.
True, it's not just a story of Apple besting Intel. AMD has been beating them too.
Rough recent history for Intel.
I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch, they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But the choice was really to switch to either themselves or AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who knows, that's alternate history speculation at this point.
The article in question is about Intel potentially getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I think a competitive market is important.
But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in an alternate reality.
Compared to the delays that Intel have seen in recent years it's honestly quite impressive that Apple have managed to get new silicon every year largely on time.
I'm not saying what you think is wrong, but your view seems like it may be narrow, and missing the bigger ecosystem.
Intel has certainly dominated consumer computer sales over the past decade, and until 4 years ago they were largely still selling the best chips for most consumer use cases (outside of mobile.) Intel had several missteps, but I don't think their dominant position was the only source of their problems, or simply that they thought they didn't have to try. They legitimately had some bad decisions and engineering problems. While the management is now changing, and that might get their engineering ducks in a row, the replacement of Intel with Apple Silicon in Apple's products is not likely to be some kind of "waking up" moment for Intel, in my opinion. Either they'll figure out their problems and somehow get back on an even keel with other chip designers and fabrication, or they won't.
Meanwhile other competitors in x86 and ARM have also have a short-term history of success and failure, again regardless of what Apple is doing. And the timelines for these plans of execution are often measured in the scale of two to three years, and I'm not seeing how Apple successfully designing CPUs would change these roadmaps for competitors.
For everyone involved, particularly those utilizing TSMC, there are benefits over time as processes improve and enable increases in performance and efficiency due to process rather than design, and the increased density will benefit any chip designers that can afford to get on newer processes.
I guess if I'd attempt to summarize, it's not clear who is motivated and able to compete against Apple in ARM design. In other words, is there a clear ARM market outside of iOS/macOS and outside of Android (where chip designers already compete)? And in the Linux/Windows consumer computing space, there's going to be a divide. Those that can accept a transition to macOS and value the incredible efficiency of Apple Silicon will do so. Those that continue buying within their previous ecosystems will continuing comparing the options they have (Intel/AMD), where currently chips are getting better. AMD has been executing very well over four years now, and Intel's latest chips are bringing solid gains in IPC and integrated GPU performance, though they still have process issues to overcome if they wish to catch back up in efficiency, and they may also need to resolve process issues to regain a foothold in HEDT. But even there, where AMD seems pretty clearly superior on most metrics, the shift in market share is slow, and momentum plus capacity give Intel a lot of runway.
The only other consideration is for Windows to transition to ARM, but there's still a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Will an ARM chip come out with Apple Silicon like performance, despite poor x86 emulation software in Windows when run on ARM? Or will Microsoft create a Rosetta-like translation software that eases the transition? I'm not clear on what will drive either of those to happen.
In this case of course having multiple products to graduate their own silicon through, and enough cash to design and build a chip, require you to be a huge company. But it shows strategic excellence and a long-term planning horizon to pull this off.
(Note I’m using the original strict definition of Disruption from Christensen, not the hand-wavey TechCrunch slogan.)
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