Friday, November 1st 2024
Apple and Samsung in the Fray to Acquire Intel: Rumor
Apple and Samsung are reportedly in the fray to acquire Intel, according a spectacular rumor cited by Moore's Law is Dead. This would put the list of companies looking to acquire Intel at 3—Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm. All three are Arm licensees, with unique characteristics. Apple currently has an Arm-based SoC hardware division that makes custom chips for all its devices, including Macs. Samsung would go on to be an overseas parent company for an American heritage company like Intel, but something like this is not unheard of when you consider examples such as Boston Dynamics being acquired by Hyundai Motors, or Westinghouse Nuclear's acquisition by Japan's Toshiba, before changing hands to Canadian Bookfield Partners. Then there's Qualcomm—the American company is having a bit of a falling out with Arm, and the prospect of owning the x86 IP should be tempting.
Intel retains large amounts of market-share in both the PC processor and server processor markets, however, the company's stock price has been on a downward trend for several quarters now, causing its valuation to drop to levels where any of the other big tech companies can afford to buy it out. The company spent close to $10 billion on a GPU architecture project spanning not just a contemporary graphics architecture to power the integrated graphics solutions of its PC processors, but also discrete gaming GPUs; and most importantly, an AI GPU architecture under the "Ponte Vecchio" project. Intel's Xe-HP AI GPU missed its performance targets or was too late to the market, leaving Intel with a gaping hole that it could only fill with a slew of cost-cutting measures. It doesn't help that Intel Foundry is losing its edge, and none of the logic tiles of Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" processor is made on an Intel foundry node.
Sources:
Moore's Law is Dead (YouTube), Tom's Guide
Intel retains large amounts of market-share in both the PC processor and server processor markets, however, the company's stock price has been on a downward trend for several quarters now, causing its valuation to drop to levels where any of the other big tech companies can afford to buy it out. The company spent close to $10 billion on a GPU architecture project spanning not just a contemporary graphics architecture to power the integrated graphics solutions of its PC processors, but also discrete gaming GPUs; and most importantly, an AI GPU architecture under the "Ponte Vecchio" project. Intel's Xe-HP AI GPU missed its performance targets or was too late to the market, leaving Intel with a gaping hole that it could only fill with a slew of cost-cutting measures. It doesn't help that Intel Foundry is losing its edge, and none of the logic tiles of Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" processor is made on an Intel foundry node.
123 Comments on Apple and Samsung in the Fray to Acquire Intel: Rumor
285K is more impressive as a belt buckle than a CPU.
It should also be said that Intel and Apple don't even compete in the same segments. Apple creates laptops, smartphones, products related to entertainment such as the Apple TV and AirPods, and smartwatches, as well as has a huge division related to just services such as Apple Music and Apple TV+ which rakes in almost $100 billion a year alone from all their services. Intel is pretty much only known for their designing and engineering of chips designed around the x86 architecture for client and server.
Apple designs and engineers chips too, but they create chips based on the ARM architecture, not on the x86 architecture, and they are strictly for use in their own hardware products, such as the Mac, iPhone, and iPad; they don't sell them to consumers to buy and use in their own builds, nor do they license them out or sell them to third-party OEMs. So I do not believe them acquriing Intel would fall under any antitrust or anticompetive laws. And I believe Apple would benefit from acquring at least Intel's foundry business, as it would give them an entry path into reducing their reliance on foreign companies, such as TSMC, for their manufacturing of chips.
finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/
Is there a correlation with all these rumours ( this is Not the 1st one during last a couple of months! ) about absolutely Not possible takeover of Intel Corporation?
There was a company called DEC that was just as big as Intel with similar products and services. DEC had over 140,000 employees at one time. It sold products to the US government including the military. It was bought by Compaq which was in turn bought by HP.
Acquisitions and mergers happen. It’s much easier for a US company to buy Intel but overseas companies can too. For example,
www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/5/12/defense-contractor-reinvents-itself-to-operate-under-foreign-ownership
There are hurdles of course when big companies are acquired by foreign ones as shown by the above example. But it can happen. And by the way, that’s an example of a defense contractor in whole. Intel is only a defense contractor in part.
AMD picked up the DEC Alpha CPU part of the business, handily to use the EV6 bus for Athlon products rather than try to ground up develop or keep using Intel Socket7 - confusingly Intel ended up with the DEC chip design part (hey another fab and team to add to the business I guess).
There are some parallels - Intel have sold off some business units, some understandably, but not all making sense - Intel spinning off the FPGA business doesn't really make sense to me considering the business they are in, but for the most part Intel are not having the downfall DEC/Digital had.... yet
Intel's "intellectual property" is causing losses of US$16 billion per quarter...AMD can't buy Intel because it would have a monopoly on x86.
And if Nvidia bought Intel, it would crush AMD.
The market is CPUs and there are dozens and dozens of CPU designers and manufacturers.
Nvidia could not get ARM because it would have been uncompetitive which is different than a monopoly.Is that true? He has been 100% wrong on everything he ever posted?
This is due to Intel publishing their quarterly financials.
intel can survive without the fabs and GPU stuff…
IMO Just like person insolvency, you can keep your “house and car” (Canada) if you can afford the payments…
so intel keeps the “instruction set” becomes fab less, gets rid of the “boat anchor” GPU division and uses the Qualcomm’s newly acquired fabs for intel.
(Wiki states the Qualcomm is an American Company, )
don’t not know why I though it was similar Samsung (Korean owned)
The likes of Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Winsor & Newton, Staedler, Canson, Faber Castell, Levi's, Pilot, Bausch and Lomb, Bosch, etc... have been around for over a century, and survive on brand prestige...along with the fact that they are doing business in a market that's already been stabilized, and not that susceptible to technological breakthrough.
Nike Adidas and Puma have a symbiotic relationship with sports and athletes: their sponsorship is a big chunk of an athlete's living hood, and they get marketing benefits from being associated with Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé and so on. When Nike developed shoes that were so good, that it noticeably made people wearing them better, said shoes got banned. So there's not really an incentive to make something groundbreaking in that field and extinguish the competition. (the same thing happened with the swimming suit that provided too much buoyancy. Every brand had to settle to something more plain and standard)
Massive difference with Intel who's doing business in an area that's constantly pursuing innovation, and when they hit a performance wall, things get bad really fast. if the competition is better. Nobody is going to ban a CPU or GPU for being too good over the competition :D Most of the big companies that kicked the bucket either failed to keep up in a market that moved fast, did business in a sector that stopped being relevant in the grand scheme of things, or just plain bad business moves.
Yes, The world is massivelly different from it was 50 years ago... but look outside of tech, and you'll realize that old money from as far back as the 18th century is still doing great even though they've never been involved in the computer, internet or A.I craze. There are categories of goods that humanity has been lusting after for several millennia, (I'm talking 10 000 BC) and those goods are still massively popular today. Even if they don't really bring any tangible value beyond "questionable fun"
Who will be around in another century?