According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary deal to manufacture some of Apple’s chips. The WSJ and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Apple had been in talks with both Intel and Samsung to diversify its suppliers for advanced chips, which currently rest almost entirely with TSMC.
Now, it would appear that there is a deal in place—at least in principle. Intel was a leading chip manufacturer for decades, but only for chips of its own design. More recently, Intel’s manufacturing prowess has fallen behind the state of the art, where TSMC is the go-to company to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world. Its bleeding-edge processes are used by Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and others.
Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has promised to revitalize Intel’s chip foundry business until its manufacturing processes are no longer second-best, while opening up the company’s chip manufacturing to make other companies’ products. It’s not clear which chips would be first in line for Intel’s plants.
It’s not clear what chips Intel would manufacture for Apple, nor when production would begin. Intel’s most advanced new production process, called “18A” (for “18 angstrom”), is generally considered to be a competitor for TSMC’s most advanced 2nm process (18 angstroms is 1.8 nanometers). At the big Computex conference next month, Intel will be showing off its Nova Lake desktop processors, Panther Lake mobile/handheld chips, and Clearwater Forest server processors, all made on the 18A process.
If this process is as good as it appears to be, Apple could theoretically produce its latest M-series and A-series chips with Intel. However, chip designs are largely fab-specific, and it’s not trivial to simply take an existing design and have it made with another company’s exclusive foundry process. It seems more likely that Apple would start by manufacturing chips that are a little further behind the bleeding edge, such as S-series chips for Apple Watch or the company’s N or C series networking chips.
