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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Well for decades Intel's competitive advantage was the fabs. They executed well and it was hard to compete. There's been dozens of projects to compete with Intel that failed to deliver, largely because they couldn't compete with Intel's fabs. I always felt bad for AMD, they often ended up competing with Intel using fabs that were a generation behind.

However the latest stumble does show the weakness of that approach. Nothing is stopping Intel from using a 3rd party fab, however every chip they farm out is one less to amortize their fab related R&D over.

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Is there any chance Apple would switch from Intel to AMD or it’s own x86 design made by TSMC?

Do they need to licence x86 fiest or some sort of other good nuff reason?

Seems pretty much impossible for anyone but AMD and Intel to make an x86 without causing IP related issues, at least in the USA. AMD did recently try to subvert this with a complex setup of partnerships for a CPU that will only be sold inside of China.

Not sure what x86 has to offer Apple though. Their control of their platform would allow them to switch architectures, just like they have twice before. It's widely rumored that Apple will migrate their x86 products to Arm based products. They have invested pretty heavily in Arm.

I mean, x86_64 came out in 2000. The basic patents behind it should be expiring right about now.

There are many patents around microarchitectural optimizations and also features like performance monitoring, virtualization, etc.

It happened a few times to me to see a new, still undocumented, feature mentioned in Intel slides, and consult the patent to learn more about it.

It's not like AMD and Intel agree on how to do performance monitoring and virtualization. What's a third implementations in the grand scheme of things?

For the roughly 150M New iPhone Unit sold every year, Apple needs just one SoC. One. And it could be reused next year.

For the roughly 25M Mac sold every year, Apple needs lots of design with different TDP. Fanless TDP sub 10W for MacBook, 15 - 25W for MacBook Air like. 35W for MacBook Pro, Upto 100W for iMac, and up to 200W for iMac Pro and Mac Pro. That is around 5 design variation for the 25M unit.

I still don't see how Apple would do it. Especially for the Pros, why would you design CPU aimed at 100W+ when they represent less than 2.5M unit per year. A lot easier just switch to AMD Zen 2 when the timing is right.

You forgot the 15-inch, so make that six.

Apple doesn't have the rights to design x86, and it will never* get them. Only Intel, AMD and Via can do that. Intel and AMD cross-license each other's patents. Not sure how Via got the rights, but I think a successful blind reverse engineering effort and a court was involved at some point. So Apple would either have to get licenses from Intel _and_ AMD or it would have to go the same route Via did. Both sound unlikely. At the same time, Apple has an excellent ARM architecture going.

*Never is a dangerous word

How about Apple buying Via?

Apple actually has enough cash to buy Intel. Or AMD 10 times.

AMD's licenses from Intel have some strings attached. I think they basically cannot be bought while keeping the rights to x86. A bought AMD could possibly threaten to no longer grant licenses to Intel, but I'm sure Intel's lawyers have thought of that.

Apple buying Intel could work, I guess (anti-trust might get involved), but I don't think it would be a wise investment. Apple doesn't have the volume to keep Intel busy alone.

I don't think they'd do it either, or that they'd even need to. I just think it's kinda funny that Apple has enough cash to outright buy both Intel and AMD.

Apple could buy Intel for the tech, AMD just to close it. Then stop selling CPUs or licences altogether. Just ramp up selling Mac's. Then PC dies. :)

That's exactly the reason why anti-trust regulations exit.

Yup. It's not something that could realistically happen. But in truly free market it could.

If only! Think, if we lived in a genuine free market, what glories we could see. All hail the monocorp.

I'm always amused how true "free market" apologists argue that:

a) monopolies don't arise b) are good

Apple doesnt need x86, almost nobody needs it anymore. Buy AMD, keep AMD64, throw away 32bit.

That would be the way to go, but why invest in x86 at the time where it mattered the least to Apple's bottom line?

ARM is the way to go.

Is there a reason RISC V is off the table?

As for right now, speed and features. Apple is already pretty invested in ARM and have the in-house experts. Managing and developing two processor architectures in parallel is a massive duplication of effort, just to avoid paying ARM a licens, a licens that Apple can easily afford.

In the long run, no there's no reason why Apple couldn't use RISC V in place of ARM, but not without a large upfront cost.

Not possible from my understanding. The only reason Via has an x86 license is due to a successful settlement (forgot details of the case) with Intel in 2003[0] after acquiring assets from National Semiconductor and under the terms of the settlement got a 10yr license. That got extended to 15yrs and is due to expire this year last I heard.

Licenses to the x86 ISA can’t be bought or transferred via acquisition. Re: the other question someone asked about patent expiration, a patent expired version of the ISA is pretty worthless. Each new iteration gets new patents.

Update: [0] - a source for Via lawsuit: https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-via-bury-the-hatchet/

Patents run out. I should be able to design something using ideas from more than 17 years ago. Companies try to block this by filing continuing new patents but the time limit should allow only using the old ideas.

the old ideas aren't good enough to compete in 2018. You're going the stuff that remains patented in order to stay relevant

Most programs aren't going to notice a lack of AVX.

They'd surely try an in-house ARM design long before considering an x86 chip of their own design, especially given Apple's enormous success with their own ARM designs in the cellphone space. Rumor mill has been suggesting such a move for a while too.

Apple have successfully managed major instruction set transitions in the past, I think x86 to ARM would probably be the "easiest" one yet.

Intel could bet on technologies that allow leverage their design-fab close relationships.

Like integrating more non-CPU things into the CPU. FPGA, neural coprocessors, DSP, and stuff. FPGA is on the way, but while just couple together CPU and FPGA connecting them by QPI is great, but it's not the things I'm talking about.

What we could wait from Intel is coprocessors real-time offloading, automagically done by (very sophisticated as on Intel x64) CPU control unit. Tight coupling might allow very fast (partial) reconfiguration of that FPGA-like coprocessors - and that's when you need your own fab to make that coupling really tight, and optimize everything down to the last bit.

I've been wondering what Intel's moves will be now they own Altera (FPGA). Was tinkering with dev boards with Cyclone V FPGA with embedded ARM - but if Intel kills that then they lose me to Xilinx zynq, I'm not interested in the Intel ISA.

Intel released Xeon Gold 6138P processor with a built-in Altera Arria 10 GX 1150 FPGA recently. Considering the all obstacles on the way to merge two big companies, that was almost fast.

It's good (and expected) that Intel merge their cores with Altera's FPGAs. My worry is that Intel will drop ARM (given the earlier StrongARM market exit) and leave the market that Altera created for FPGA-ARM SoCs. Of course, they can assuage that fear by making a concrete public commitment to a 5 year roadmap which includes ARM, for example. But in default of that, you have to wonder if investing in learning their tooling and ARM integration will be a waste of time. Which will be their loss, and Xilinx's gain.

> the market that Altera created for FPGA-ARM SoCs

Wasn't it Actel with SmartFusion?

ST Micro had a sorta-never-launched FPGA and Arm SoC called "Greenfield" that they announced back in 2005.

https://www.st.com/resource/en/data_brief/CD00051559.pdf

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1195750

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