Why are AMD helping to sell a competitor's product? The article says it's strictly business, but I would have thought the quick buck made today by selling graphics chips to Intel would be outweighed by the long term benefit (e.g. growth in the combined CPU/GPU market) this provides to Intel.
If I remember the last numbers right, Apple Laptop sales share are around 10% at best, so if anything like that story happened, it would not be them but HP (25%)/Lenovo (20%)/Dell (15%).
Worth noting that Apple’s share of high-end Intel chips is much higher. Thus, Apple’s share of Intel’s consumer revenue is probably substantially north of 10%.
Are you suggesting that companies like HP or Lenovo couldn't get into producing ARM chips if they wanted to ?
Intel isn't threatened by ARM yet in a performance laptop.
Of course one could reply laptops don't need that much power anymore to do what most users use them for today (thus people even here using tablet as their main tool) but that's another issue entirely, "much cheaper and good enough", one where Apple isn't Intel's main opponent either (I would even wager in that one, Intel is its own ennemy, given how terrible they've been handling the Atom brand and performance to protect margins).
Those companies could conceivably do a lot of things, but that's a lot different to having in-house CPU and GPU design teams already staffed and firing on all cylinders for years.
Not sure I get you re Apple being an opponent to Intel for "cheap" parts. It goes without saying that Apple would not sell their own stuff to anyone else. And for their own use, I'm sure the hardware would be very cheap to manufacture.
Doesn't change what I said though. Unless you expect Apple to take over the laptop market (if they didn't reach above 10% during the last pro-apple decade, they're not going to do so now especially given their current issues in the field), or start selling their custom chips to third parties (they've never ever done so, unless I'm mistaken) AND those chips taking over the market, they're not the threat Intel has to worry about.
Intel has to worry about Nvidia taking over the graphics and machine learning, AMD punching above its weight in workstation with EPYC and ThreadRipper, and ARM being cheap and good enough in all the low power fields and growing.
A middle of the line, ARM based performance oriented chip for laptop is no threat to i5/i7, except indeed the risk to lose their place in macs.
I just don't see how other laptop manufacturers are doing as being particularly relevant to Apple's decision making.
If they ditched Intel, that would very publically rip a stripe off of Intel, regardless of absolute market share. Not something Intel wants, and is what I contended Intel have gone to an unusual length, integrating AMD graphics, to avoid.
This is a joint venture against Nvidia basically. ML is the next big thing, and Nvidia has smartly positioned GPUs as the best way to do ML. AMD needs to claw back marketshare from Nvidia, and partnering with Intel is a quick way to do it. Intel also needs to keep Nvidia in check.
Now they should co-develop and promote a well designed open source ML framework, something that can compete with CUDA. AMD isn't up to the task, but Intel is.
