Intel in talks with Apple to build iPhone processors(tech.fortune.cnn.com) |
Intel in talks with Apple to build iPhone processors(tech.fortune.cnn.com) |
This is an absolutely crucial moment for Intel and I'd love to be a fly on the wall on these negotiations. The nuances of the decision making must be absolutely fascinating.
Intel, I feel is making the wrong bet going all-in on mobile. This is somewhat like a "part two" of the Nokia collaboration on MeeGo except they're probably looking for more assurances from Apple.
The problem for Intel is one the one hand their process advantage is slipping (albeit slowly) and third-party fabs are "good enough" processes for mobile, and on the other hand everybody else is going ARM for cloud computing hoping to beat Intel on price.
Apple on the other hand has to consider the pain and cost of another "Rosetta" process for iPad, but it should be much easier since app delivery is constrained to their app store.
Apple definitely has the upper hand in negotiations, but that depends on how constrained they are on the supply side. I'm sure that Tim Cook would have planned accordingly, the question is how good a deal can they wring out of Intel instead of moving to TSMC, or if they get their act together GloFo.
This goes with any business, but Intel should figure out what its "plus" is. They own perf/watt and perf/thread, and their uarch, x86, is the standard for cloud loads. As the cloud matures and becomes more uarch agnostic, everything being open source, they still have to find a way of differentiating themselves.
The point is 20 years ago the majority of coders were coding x86, directly, then 10 years ago say WinIntel, and now our apis are REST calls. That is to say, the majority of programming has been getting increasingly removed from the underlying hardware. Intel it seems finally clued in to this with MS announcing WinRT.
So in short, Intel should start innovating at the platform level. And hey, the platform isn't just a microprocessor anymore.
I would actually make a different argument though. As time goes on the absolute cost of the CPU is not that important. For big data centers lowering costs is about efficiency more than cheaper hardware. So in my mind a lot of what Intel is trying to do on the Mobile side, both laptop and smartphone/tablet, will help them in the data center. If Intel can drive down both peak and idle power consumption while maintaining or even improving both single threaded and multi threaded performance, there's potential to really lower the power needed to run a data center and in turn create a lot of value.
The real question is what's the next big thing going to be? Eventually the current CPU model will give out to something else. Maybe that's something like Psi or Tesla or maybe something completely different.