Even at $15-20B all cash, Apple would be overpaying, and then having to deal with all of the continuing business of supporting AMD, including the ATi problem - there's just no way to acquire AMD without destroying the graphics/gpu-compute market (you know, any more than AMD has already done themselves). There's probably some other explosive x86 licensing terms that would have to be hammered out under the transfer as well (iirc, in the past when AMD buyouts have been discussed, to deal with the architecture licensing stickiness they all had to be "reverse mergers" with AMD, and that killed every prospect of that happening...)
Just not worth the hassle compared to the price of an ARM license or sticking with Intel (or even just investing a huge chunk of cash in AMD to build super power efficient laptop chips, if you had any confidence that they could pull it off).
The AMD-VIA-Intel patent cross licensing triumvirate has buyout, sellout, and a bunch of other miscellaneous prevention/mitigation clauses.
Essentially you cant just buy Intel, AMD, or VIA and acquire the rights to make x86/x86_64 processors. You could acquire a controlling or other majority ownership stake in one of the companies and then continue to run them as a wholly owned subsidiary.
In addition, Intel, AMD and VIA cant just license you the rights either. However you could enter into a Joint Venture with Intel, AMD, or VIA as a ‘passive partner’ whereby the subsidiary has inherited access to the technology. This route has been undertaken without legal repercussions so far to VIA. Zhaoxin is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government, and has so far produced a line of x86 compatible processors on a 28nm process for the Chinese domestic market that are apparently performance competitive.
Apple has more than enough cash to fund a joint venture with AMD or VIA that could enable them to bypass any possible complaints from Intel about emulation violating their intellectual property. Apple could take this route to build an ARM based processor that had sufficient x86_64 helpers to speed things up enough that the translation/emulation performance was negligible. Heck they could use this to design their own entire x86_64 CPUs and if it was with AMD they could borrow a GPU core they are familiar with too.
At the end of the day, Apple has enough money they can basically do anything they want with regards to technology.
The challenge will be successful execution in the face of a market that has become increasingly immune to the reality distortion field Apple projects, the demise of Steve Jobs significantly decreased the power of Apple to distort reality in a way that is consistently in its favour. Not so much of a ‘If Steve was still at Apple’ as simply ‘Apple isn’t the same now, and this changes the mathematics of the situation’.
Thanks for the insights on the AMD/VIA/Intel triumvirate. It’s such an odd model that x86 has landed on.
> Apple could take this route to build an ARM based processor that had sufficient x86_64 helpers to speed things up enough that the translation/emulation performance was negligible
Totally agree, this is exactly what I thought when I read the story. There’s a lot of transistor budget these days for special hardware, especially in a larger / more power-hungry part that is substituting for something quite expensive (Intel chips).
Mac’s role as the heavy-lifter in Apple’s ecosystem means it has different trade-offs to consider, and my guess is that definitely points to a JIT or compatibility layer for legacy x86 apps. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be worth the effort unless it could be reasonably performant, which means silicon. The optics would be really bad if they launch a platform transition and it was less than ~75% of last year’s computer.
With that said, they’ll be pushing hard for app developers to transition over, and might throw away that compatibility silicon after a few years. It’s a really cool thing to be your own chipmaker and have the levers that Apple does in this situation to add compatibility silicon and not just accept another architecture’s limitations.
