Mobile does, indeed, make for strange bedfellows. As it turns out, executives at Intel say they are open to the prospect of working with their rivals, not the least of which is Apple. According to a published report from Reuters, Intel would consider "any proposal to use its advanced manufacturing technology to make processors based on a competing architecture."
"There are certain customers that would be interesting to us and certain customers that wouldn't," Intel's Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith revealed Thursday at an investor event in London. He said "Intel would be happy to produce chip cores based on its own architecture for other companies but that allowing rival architectures to be manufactured in its plants would be a tough decision."
But would Intel really do business with Apple? Well, for starters, Intel is already mentioning Apple by name - Apple, of course, already uses an ARM-based processor (made by Samsung Electronics) for the iPad. And based on what we've all been hearing and reading, there's a good chance that Apple is eager to branch off from doing such big business with Samsung.
"If Apple or Sony came to us and said 'I want to do a product that involves your IA (Intel architecture) core and put some of my IP around it,' I wouldn't blink," Smith said. "That would be fantastic business for us. Then you get into the middle ground of 'I don't want it to be a IA core, I want it to be my own custom-designed core,' and then you are only getting the manufacturing margin, (and) that would be a much more in-depth discussion and analysis."
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Intel Says It Wants to Work with Apple
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