Intel looking for Apple investment

[Cmaier]

Intel and Apple hold investment talks, no deal in sight - 9to5Mac

Following investments by Nvidia and the US government, the chipmaker is looking at Apple to help continue its comeback. Here are the details.

9to5mac.com

No benefit to Apple other than politically, I should think.

 

[dada_dave]

Intel and Apple hold investment talks, no deal in sight - 9to5Mac

Following investments by Nvidia and the US government, the chipmaker is looking at Apple to help continue its comeback. Here are the details.

9to5mac.com

No benefit to Apple other than politically, I should think.

The only other thing I could think of is long term making sure someone already established is there to compete with TSMC, but that’s pretty shaky. Rapidus in the very long term might eventually provide a counterweight to TSMC depending on how things go. Samsung might eventually fix themselves. I dunno.

 

[Cmaier]

The only other thing I could think of is long term making sure someone already established is there to compete with TSMC, but that’s pretty shaky. Rapidus in the very long term might eventually provide a counterweight to TSMC depending on how things go. Samsung might eventually fix themselves. I dunno.

they’d be better off investing the money in their own fab than giving it to intel. or investing in my idea for a cat-to-human translator. or burning it to power a data center.

 

[fischersd]

they’d be better off investing the money in their own fab than giving it to intel. or investing in my idea for a cat-to-human translator. or burning it to power a data center.

I really don't think that cats would produce a lot of heat when combusted to drive a turbine, but no judgement here.

 

[Vincent Hannah]

There's no traditional technical or business justification for Apple investing in Intel, but it provides protection from Trump, as Trump will stupidly see it as Apple further increasing investment in "US manufacturing". I see them doing it for that reason alone.

 

[casperes1996]

Intel and Apple hold investment talks, no deal in sight - 9to5Mac

Following investments by Nvidia and the US government, the chipmaker is looking at Apple to help continue its comeback. Here are the details.

9to5mac.com

No benefit to Apple other than politically, I should think.

Maybe cheaper thunderbolt controllers? A bigger say in the direction of thunderbolt. Iirc it was already co-developed by them so maybe they already have that.
Maybe there’s some good IP to get a share in like XeSS for improving metalfx or some interconnect stuff.

 

[mr_roboto]

Maybe cheaper thunderbolt controllers? A bigger say in the direction of thunderbolt. Iirc it was already co-developed by them so maybe they already have that.

The latter, and Apple already doesn't use Intel thunderbolt controllers - in Apple Silicon, the TB controller is internal to the SoC.

NB: there may still be Intel TB chips on the boards, but they're retimers rather than controllers. Retimers are signal conditioning chips that are necessary to make Thunderbolt data transmission function over longer distances and through connectors. Pushing as much as 40 Gbps through a single wire pair is quite difficult and the signal needs some boost/fixup along the way. (This is why high performance TB cables always have chips embedded in the cable heads.) A retimer is a much simpler chip than a controller - it doesn't really understand all of what it's passing through, its job is just to make sure the data gets to its ultimate destination in a readable way.

Intel used to be the only game in town for TBT retimers, but I think things have been opened up to other suppliers as part of the deal where Intel donated TB to the USB-IF.