Member-only story
Apple and Its ARM Competitors
Intel and AMD are facing a large number of competitors, now that ARM has become a viable alternative on the desktop and on servers. But will this competition not also hurt Apple?
In my previous story on the dilemma Intel and AMD face with the rise of ARM, one of my readers Sergiy Yevtushenko, remarked that this should be an equally big problem for Apple:
Now, by switching to ARM, Apple opens a Pandora box. Now its main competitors in the CPU area not limited to AMD and Intel. There are also a number of other manufacturers like Qualcomm, Allwinner, Samsung and countless others who licensed ARM.
Superficially this may seem like a problem to Apple. They have all these competitors making ARM chips just like them. Isn’t there a high chance one of them makes a better chip than Apple? However there is a key difference between Apple and Intel:
Apple is not in the business of selling microchips. Apple is in the business of selling Macs, iPads and iPhones.
If Intel cannot sell their chips, then they cannot make money. If Apple cannot make better ARM chips than the competition, then they can switch to buying ARM chips from whomever make the best ones. No, in fact it is even simpler than that. Almost all ARM competition is based on intellectual property (IP) sold by ARM Ltd. Companies such as Qualcomm, Amazon and Ampere buy finished designes such as the Neoverse N1 microprocessor core from ARM Ltd.
These companies can then use tailor made software to duplicate a bunch of these Neoverse cores several times over, connect them, add some memory and voilà the got the blueprints for an entirely new chip. This blueprint can be sent to large semi conductor facilities run by companies like TSMC, which mass produces chips for customers.
That means Apple isn’t tying up massive quantities of capital to be able to built their M1 chips. It is really just software design. There are no…
