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I could understand Apple going into CPU or GPU business. After all when you have 250M annual devices shipment, roughly the size of the whole PC market segment, these high margin cost could be eliminated, not to mention they aren't getting the best or what they need.

But Memory? But NAND and DRAM are commodity, in fact for most of their life time Memory companies tends to lose money. Not to mention China are pouring in tens of billions into memory Fabs alongside with billions of other incentives. In pretty much every business Chinese steps in is a race to bottom. I just dont see any value of getting a holding on to a memory fab / capacity.




Tell that to Samsung. Their 3d vnand gave them a crushing lead for the last several years in the nand market.


Apple is already designing their own chips, including both CPU + GPU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mobile_application_proce...

I guess running a chip foundry isn't something they would benefit a lot from (they can contract for process improvements just as well as they could build them out).


This could change when/if computational RAM goes mainstream.


Well, I can imagine that if you can build a GPU, then you can also build a memory with processing elements attached to it. Therefore, going after CPU/GPU companies seems more sensible.


Memory/processing integration is not as simple as it sounds: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/134585/preci...


For Apple, you should not think in terms of profit. They probably care more about power consumption and having the best of the best.




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