> The transition from PowerPC to Intel was about IBM and Motorola not being able to deliver parts...The transition from Intel to ARM is about Intel not being able to deliver parts...Apple knows it can deliver the parts it wants with its own processors at this point.
I think this is the key reasoning. There's something really interesting happening here. In the past, when Apple transitioned from Motorola to PowerPC Apple wasn't big enough to design and fab their own chips, this was also true when they moved from PowerPC to Intel.
However, Apple has some choices here, and I think the decision comes down to long term supply-chain risk:
1) Switch to AMD. Their processors are blowing the doors off of Intel, at better prices. They aren't having the same process problems and their high-end components are fantastic. However, history has shown AMD surge ahead for a bit, then Intel, and back again. Apple probably doesn't want to risk this happening after they engage in some huge volume discount contract. More importantly, neither Intel nor AMD are winning in the lower power vs performance segments.
2) Become their own fabless designer. The risks are enormous. What if they can't keep pushing the performance envelope against Intel/AMD? What if their fab partners can't keep their processes moving forward? What if they fail to make this architecture jump (again)? But if gives them better supply chain control and increases their vertical integration.
In some sense it points to a weakness of highly vertically integrated companies...as a model it makes their entire product lines dependent on every component being able to progress. If any component lags, the entire product line suffers. So outside suppliers, who have multiple customers to please, become key sources of risk and it will become the instinct of the company to move the riskiest parts of its supply chain in-house.
If Apple is unable to keep advancing ARM chips in terms of performance (regardless of power) it will be a problem for them. But one final advantage of building their own, is that they can obfuscate this component from the rest of the market and make comparisons on cores/Ghz/etc virtually impossible. It's a bit like how Apple really doesn't even advertise how much RAM is in their portable devices.
> Apple wasn't big enough to design and fab their own chips, this was also true when they moved from PowerPC to Intel.
Note there were rumours going around about whether or not Apple was going to buy PA Semi (or at least contact them) for their PWRficient CPU (implementing PPC).
Ultimately they did buy PA Semi in 2008, though for the skills and they've since made all of the iPhone/iPad CPUs.
The fact that our low-power chips also happen to be lower die size is an artifact of path dependence. The primary market for lower power was battery powered devices of which phones are by far the most numerous. So, the lower power chips started there and didn't have much to do. As those have gained sophistication with time, they have also grown in die size.
Xeon and server chips generally want to maximize memory bandwidth--and they make a whole series of architectural tradeoffs to accommodate that.
Phone chips generally want to maximize power efficiency and basically don't care about memory bandwidth at all. They effectively don't want to turn on the system memory or flash, period, if they can avoid it. One way to do that is to cache things completely in local on-chip RAM.
Computer architects will make completely different tradeoffs for the two domains.
I think this is the key reasoning. There's something really interesting happening here. In the past, when Apple transitioned from Motorola to PowerPC Apple wasn't big enough to design and fab their own chips, this was also true when they moved from PowerPC to Intel.
However, Apple has some choices here, and I think the decision comes down to long term supply-chain risk:
1) Switch to AMD. Their processors are blowing the doors off of Intel, at better prices. They aren't having the same process problems and their high-end components are fantastic. However, history has shown AMD surge ahead for a bit, then Intel, and back again. Apple probably doesn't want to risk this happening after they engage in some huge volume discount contract. More importantly, neither Intel nor AMD are winning in the lower power vs performance segments.
2) Become their own fabless designer. The risks are enormous. What if they can't keep pushing the performance envelope against Intel/AMD? What if their fab partners can't keep their processes moving forward? What if they fail to make this architecture jump (again)? But if gives them better supply chain control and increases their vertical integration.
In some sense it points to a weakness of highly vertically integrated companies...as a model it makes their entire product lines dependent on every component being able to progress. If any component lags, the entire product line suffers. So outside suppliers, who have multiple customers to please, become key sources of risk and it will become the instinct of the company to move the riskiest parts of its supply chain in-house.
If Apple is unable to keep advancing ARM chips in terms of performance (regardless of power) it will be a problem for them. But one final advantage of building their own, is that they can obfuscate this component from the rest of the market and make comparisons on cores/Ghz/etc virtually impossible. It's a bit like how Apple really doesn't even advertise how much RAM is in their portable devices.