He's got two interesting quotes from what he claims is an Intel source, one of which we already heard from Bloomberg's Gurman, but I thought I'd post both here:
"Honestly Apple scares us more than AMD at the moment. They aren't sitting still, and we are worried they have far greater ambitions than most people are currently assuming...not to mention they get the latest nodes before AMD!"
I think that isn't just an Apple CPU thing , but also an Apple GPU threat for Intel. Intel was the biggest Mac GPU vendor (not AMD). Apple is out to not only completely wipe out the space that Intel's iGPUs had. They are out to wipe out all of the embedded dGPUs that were there also. Intel trying to get into the dGPU that is yet another door then cannot even try to get their foot through to even have a shoot at competing for a design win.
Intel could have hoped to maybe train losses on CPU core placement for GPU core placement. They had a relatively good working relationship on Metal driver partnership with Apple.
Intel is buying up "better" nodes than AMD is at the moment. 6nm for their Xe-HPG DP2 chips. All those wafers Intel is buying are wafers that Apple and AMD can't use. But generally, yes Intel being arrogant because they are a process node ahead of everyone else. That is over.
Apple was also one of Intel's customers who asked for inertia busting, forward looking stuff. Apple jumped over to x86 will full support for EFI. (apple didn't want to put loads of resources into BIOS). Bigger iGPUs die allocation space. Apple asked for that early also. eDRAM cached iGPUs ( Apple major buyer). Thunderbolt was a joint project. It wouldn't be surprising if Apple brought up big.little future path years ago. ( I highly doubt Microsoft was at Intel pounding the table for the change. and the bigger scheduler changes needed. Apple ... already have them, if could use them on the macOS x86 "that is fine with us." ) Is there another Intel customer that might have been suggesting that Intel completey dump 32-bit functionaly from a future processor because they were nuking all 32 bit code in 2-3 years? Probably not.
[ I think there is a Moore's Law is Dead slide that outlines that Lakefield was in part developed last year to give Microsoft solid hardware for a year to get the scheduler issues worked out in preparation for Alder Lake this year. If a usual medicore v1.0 from Microsoft that could be problematical. Although also a dual edge sword for Intel because going to enable Windows-on-ARM better also. ]
If Intel ends up with a higher density of "monkey see, monkey do" clients then they are going to miss the more forward looking feedback. ( apple also tended to buy higher average priced CPUs than those others also. )
How easily Apple wiped out Intel's offering for the iMac 24" should put Intel on notice though. I think Intel probably though Apple was going to feel more short term "pain" on the desktop transition but they probably aren't. However, that has as much to do with covering dGPU (that were embedded) than it does the CPU cores.
"We also expect Apple's upcoming chip for the Mac Pro to comprise of 32 big cores and 8 little cores. Massive IPC."
If coupled that a largish iGPU that is also pulling off the same limited bandwidth that may not be a large scalable win if myopically looking at it from just the performance CPU cores.
But yeah if Intel was thinking they were going to milk the last dregs of relevatively (for price point) buys for Xeon W-3300 for the "big" Mac Pro, that may not happen. The "half sized" Mac Pro probably work more pretty well for folks who are highly CPU core compute bound more so than GPU core bound.
I think the PC guys underestimated Apple, much like Ed Coligan's infamous quote when he was CEO of Palm, back in the day before the iPhone. Intel and AMD probably won't go extinct, but Apple have shown that the industry doesn't need to keep the x86 shackles to be successful.
Microsoft is dropping 32-bit Windows gradually. Intel has turned off BIOS support in their UEFI reference. Windows on ARM is going to do more to pull the x86_64 forward than the stuff that Apple is doing. Largely leveraging Qualcomm's celluar modem focused SoCs is the bigger problem there.
Microsoft has been trying for a couple years to go cross platform. They have just bumbled around doing it. (typical takes three tries v1 , v2 , v3 to get something out that isn't kneecapped , fumbled , or bungled in some way. )
