More explicitly. In 2006, Apple asked Intel to make a SoC for their upcoming product... the iPhone.
At the time, Intel was one of the leading ARM SoC providers, their custom XScale ARM cores were faster than anything from ARM Inc themselves. It was the perfect line of chips for smartphones.
The MBA types at Intel ran some sales projects and decided that such a chip wasn't likely to be profitable. There was apparently debate within Intel, the engineering types wanted to develop the product line anyway, and others wanting to win good-will from Apple. But the MBA types won. Not only did they reject Apple's request for an iPhone SoC, but they immediately sold off their entire XScale division to marvel (who did nothing with it) so they wouldn't even be able to change their mind later even if they wanted.
With hindsight, I think we can safely say Intel's projections for iPhone sales were very wrong. They would have easily made their money back on just the sales from the first-gen iPhone, and Apple would probably gone back to intel for at least a few generations. Even if Apple dumped them, Intel would have a great product to sell to the rapidly market of Android smartphones in the early 2010s.
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But I think it's actually far worse than just Intel missing out on the mobile market.
In 2008, Apple acquired P.A. Semi, and started work on their own custom ARM processors (and ARM SoCs). The ARM processors which Apple eventually used to replace Intel as suppler in laptops and desktops too.
Maybe Apple would have gone down that path anyway, but I really suspect Intel's reluctance to work with Apple to produce the chips Apple wanted (especially the iPhone chip) was a huge motivating factor that drove Apple down the path of developing their own CPUs.
Remember, this is 2006. Intel had only just switched to Intel in January because IBM had continually failed to deliver Apple the laptop-class powerpc chips they needed [1]. And while at that time, Intel had a good roadmap for laptop-class chips, it would have looked to Apple as if history was at risk of repeating itself, especially as they moved into the mobile market where low power consumption was even more important.
[1]TBH, IBM were failing to provide desktop-class CPUs too. But the laptop cpus were the more pressing issue. Fun fact: IBM actually tried to sell the PowerPC core they were developing for the xbox 360 and PS3 to Apple as a low-power laptop core. It was sold to Microsoft/Sony as a low-power core too, but if you look at the launch versions of both consoles, they run extremely hot, even when paired with comically large (for the era) cooling solutions.
> More explicitly. In 2006, Apple asked Intel to make a SoC for their upcoming product... the iPhone.
This isn’t strictly true. Tony Fadell and one of t- the creator of the iPod and considered co-creator of the iPhone - said in an interview with Ben Thompson (Stratechery) that Intel was never seriously in the running for iPhone chips.
Jobs wanted it. But the technical people at Apple pushed back.
Besides, especially in 2006 less than a year before the iPhone was introduced, chip decisions had already been made.
Was it really? x86 is more performance oriented and not efficiency oriented. Its variable length just makes it really hard to have a low power CPU that isn't too slow.
I think the impact of ISA is way overblown. The instruction decode pipeline is worse but doesn’t consume that many transistors in the end relative to the total size of the system. I think it has much more to do with the attitude of Intel defining the x86 market as desktop and servers and not focused on super low power parts; plus their monopoly which led to a long stagnation because they didn’t have to innovate as much.
You can see today with modern Ryzen laptop chips that aren’t that much worse than ARMs fabbed with the same node on perf/watt.
phire|1 year ago
At the time, Intel was one of the leading ARM SoC providers, their custom XScale ARM cores were faster than anything from ARM Inc themselves. It was the perfect line of chips for smartphones.
The MBA types at Intel ran some sales projects and decided that such a chip wasn't likely to be profitable. There was apparently debate within Intel, the engineering types wanted to develop the product line anyway, and others wanting to win good-will from Apple. But the MBA types won. Not only did they reject Apple's request for an iPhone SoC, but they immediately sold off their entire XScale division to marvel (who did nothing with it) so they wouldn't even be able to change their mind later even if they wanted.
With hindsight, I think we can safely say Intel's projections for iPhone sales were very wrong. They would have easily made their money back on just the sales from the first-gen iPhone, and Apple would probably gone back to intel for at least a few generations. Even if Apple dumped them, Intel would have a great product to sell to the rapidly market of Android smartphones in the early 2010s.
-----------
But I think it's actually far worse than just Intel missing out on the mobile market.
In 2008, Apple acquired P.A. Semi, and started work on their own custom ARM processors (and ARM SoCs). The ARM processors which Apple eventually used to replace Intel as suppler in laptops and desktops too.
Maybe Apple would have gone down that path anyway, but I really suspect Intel's reluctance to work with Apple to produce the chips Apple wanted (especially the iPhone chip) was a huge motivating factor that drove Apple down the path of developing their own CPUs.
Remember, this is 2006. Intel had only just switched to Intel in January because IBM had continually failed to deliver Apple the laptop-class powerpc chips they needed [1]. And while at that time, Intel had a good roadmap for laptop-class chips, it would have looked to Apple as if history was at risk of repeating itself, especially as they moved into the mobile market where low power consumption was even more important.
[1] TBH, IBM were failing to provide desktop-class CPUs too. But the laptop cpus were the more pressing issue. Fun fact: IBM actually tried to sell the PowerPC core they were developing for the xbox 360 and PS3 to Apple as a low-power laptop core. It was sold to Microsoft/Sony as a low-power core too, but if you look at the launch versions of both consoles, they run extremely hot, even when paired with comically large (for the era) cooling solutions.
scarface_74|1 year ago
This isn’t strictly true. Tony Fadell and one of t- the creator of the iPod and considered co-creator of the iPhone - said in an interview with Ben Thompson (Stratechery) that Intel was never seriously in the running for iPhone chips.
Jobs wanted it. But the technical people at Apple pushed back.
Besides, especially in 2006 less than a year before the iPhone was introduced, chip decisions had already been made.
cylemons|1 year ago
tgma|1 year ago
You can see today with modern Ryzen laptop chips that aren’t that much worse than ARMs fabbed with the same node on perf/watt.
phire|1 year ago
But Intel gave up and sold it off, right as smartphones were reaching mainstream.