Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers the keynote address during the Apple 2020 World Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California.
Brooks Kraft / Apple Inc / Brochure via Reuters
Intel said in its earnings report Thursday that it is delaying its new 7-nanometer processors in approximately six months because internal testing has revealed that performance, the number of processors that are acceptable in manufacturing, has fallen a year below the internal projections of the company.
Intel’s 7-nanometer chips are now not expected until 2022 or early 2023, CEO Bob Swan said in a call with analysts on Thursday. Meanwhile, the main rival AMD is already selling 7 nanometer chips for PCs and game drives. And Intel’s shares were punished by the news, dropping as much as 17.1% in Friday morning trading.
Intel’s new chip lag shows exactly why Apple is switching from Intel to its own chips for its Macs.
It’s a move that was announced during Apple’s developer conference last month. Once Apple makes the transition, which it says will take around two years, it will no longer need to rely on Intel’s product cycle, and delays, before it can deliver new Macs to the market.
The first Apple Macs with their own chips based on Arm Holdings designs will ship later this year, CEO Tim Cook said during WWDC. Apple already makes its own Arm-based chips for iPhones and iPads, and they are now powerful enough to power desktop and laptop computers.
The move away from Intel means that Apple now controls its own destiny for its laptops and desktops in the same way that it does for the iPhone and iPad. You don’t have to wait until 2022 or 2023 to launch powerful new computers that might otherwise try to hit the market on your own.
Delays are not a new problem for Intel. The same thing happened in 2018, when Intel delayed its 10-nanometer chips until 2019, which means that computer manufacturers like Apple and other Intel partners had to wait for Intel’s new chips to be released before they could launch new ones. products to the market.
And Apple won’t have to worry as much about the supply issues Intel may face when those new processors finally launch.
In November, for example, Dell and HP said Wall Street could expect lower revenues due to a shortage of Intel chips that affected the number of computers that HP and Dell could bring to market. Moor Insights and strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead told CNBC at the time that this was one of the areas that Swan wanted to fix when he replaced former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in January.
Apple and its developer partners still need to demonstrate that applications will run as well on a Mac with Apple as they do on a Mac with Intel. But Apple has already shown that it is capable of building very fast and efficient processors for its iPads and iPhones. And you’re trying to make switching to their own chips easy for developers by announcing the transition early to give them time to write programs that are compatible with new Macs. In fact, developers can rent a Mac mini with a chip. Apple now to test its applications on the new system.
Apple did not always trust Intel. In 2005, he announced that he would move Macs from their PowerPC chips to Intel processors by 2007. But, Apple CEO at the time, Steve Jobs, suggested the move would not be permanent.
“We believe that Intel technology will help us create personal computers for the next 10 years,” Jobs said at the time.
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