Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

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I think that Ars is over-thinking it. The simple fact is that Intel's roadmaps lately haven't been all that well aligned to Apple's product lines. Back during the days of the Apple-Intel transition, Intel was all about killer laptop chips, which was the biggest weak point of the PPC chips of the day. Apple and Intel were a good match.

When it came time for Intel to introduce the successor to the Core 2 microarchitecture, they did it with the i7, a high-end desktop chip. Apple doesn't make a high-end desktop. They make small form-factor desktops and they make workstations. It shouldn't surprise anybody that the desktop i7 didn't get picked up by Apple quickly. When the Nehalem-based Xeons were released, Apple was the first to use them, in the Mac Pro. Much later, Apple was able to get the i5 and i7 into only the biggest of the iMacs, which have always (in the Intel era) been MacBook Pros at heart.

Things have been a bit different in the laptop department because of Intel's anti-competitive behavior with respect to graphics chips. First, they refuse to grant NVidia the licenses they need to make chipsets for the mobile Nehalem processors. Then, they refuse to release a mobile i7 that doesn't contain their pathetic integrated graphics that to Apple (who is trying to ensure all their customers can have GPU-accelerated video decoding and OpenCL) is just a big lump of wasted silicon. Thanks to Intel, Apple's laptops need to add an extra graphics chip to their already-crowded motherboards. That's why none of the 13" machines have gotten an i5 yet: they're too small. In order to put an i5 in a MacBook, Apple would have make a major compromise or get really clever during a complete re-design of the internal layout.

Ars tries to partially attribute Apple's continued use of the Core 2 to a lack of engineering resources due to a focus on the iOS devices, but that sounds absurd given Apple's recent financial numbers. I think it can be entirely explained by the differing and conflicting interests of Apple and Intel. They undoubtedly are watching each other's mobile strategies, but that's not necessary to explain what's happening with the desktops.

> Ars tries to partially attribute Apple's continued use of the Core 2 to a lack of engineering resources due to a focus on the iOS devices, but that sounds absurd given Apple's recent financial numbers.

Then you haven't been paying attention to how Apple got those recent financial numbers. Apple has held operating expenses extremely low, and hasn't grown its engineering ranks significantly in almost a decade. It's not at all unreasonable to expect that engineering resources are constrained. That's how Apple likes to work.

Apple has held operating expenses extremely low, and hasn't grown its engineering ranks significantly in almost a decade.

Well - back in 2002 their R&D was about $100 million per quarter, now it's over $400 million, so I doubt your assertion.

What if you adjust that for inflation? And what percentage is that of revenue over the same period?

> Thanks to Intel, Apple's laptops need to add an extra graphics chip to their already-crowded motherboards.

Not precisely. In the latest generation of chips this is in on-die. Apple doesn't have to add Intel's integrated graphics to their motherboard, Intel ships all their chips with their integrated graphics cores inside them, sort of (but technically slightly different than) how they ship their chips with L2 caches inside them already.

Intel may well be being dicks about licensing, but to ask for a westmere i7 without Intel's integrated graphics is asking for them to spin a different die process. (Though they did do that for Apple once IIRC.)

Overall, the fact that it's there isn't a huge issue, people who don't like it just turn it off and use an off-package graphics card. I think this is more about the licensing issues than Intel needing to offer another die.

No, the point is that Apple has to add an extra non-Intel GPU because the integrated Intel GPU sucks. What was a two-chip system (Core 2 Duo + NVidia 9400) is now a three-chip system (i5 + PM55 + NVidia GPU).

Right, but that isn't because Intel won't release a different mobile i7 die. It's because they're not letting nvidia legally ship a chip that interfaces with the new Intel chips.

It's a licensing issue, not a die construction issue. The fact that all the mobile i7 dies happen to contain Intel's integrated graphics is irrelevant.

The memory controller and graphics core in Arrandale aren't on-die, but they're in the same package. This, and the fact that the GPU/memory controller is still built on a 45nm process, makes for a much bigger package - according to an earlier Ars article, the new package is twice the size of what's in the MacBook Air. It would be relatively easy (and not entirely unprecedented) for Intel to build a CPU-only Arrandale in a smaller package for Apple if they would let NVidia supply the memory controller as part of their chipset.

Yes, apologies, I play fast and loose with die/package terminology and I should be careful to be more accurate.

Anyways, your points are all quite right and Apple has asked for and gotten smaller packages before.

I still think the licensing issues trump the package issues and that more relates to Intel absorbing the northbridge onto the die. (That one actually did go on-die not just on-package I think?) It just seems silly to blame an unrelated change that added an on-package IGP for these issues.

I mean I know people have an irrational hatred for Intel's IGPs for some reason, but blaming them for the nvidia license dispute issues that are about the northbridge going on-die? I just don't get it.

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