Intel Relishing Apple Challenge As Competition Heats Up
"Apple — they push us hard" were the words of Intel's senior Vice President, Tom Kilroy, at the Global Technology Summit in New York, organized by news gathering organization Reuters on Wednesday. The renowned chip maker is ecstatic with its collaboration with Apple, and is relishing the challenge which comes with a "Designed by Apple in California" tag — a priceless reward for any parts manufacturer.
Apple's huge success with their devices is an added motivation for Intel, who claim such trend-setting products from Cupertino (like the iPhone and iPad) drive the company's thinking about future devices and the chips that will power them.
"We work very closely with them and we're constantly looking down the road at what we can be doing relative to future products. I'd go as far as to say Apple helps shape our road-map. Apple — they push us hard." said Kilroy
Intel is the world's largest chip making company and powers about 80% of the world's personal computers, but what they are really looking forward to is getting an iPhone contract. But that won't be easy.
Despite the huge success with computers, Intel have failed to gain traction in the mobile market, where manufacturers are looking for energy efficient processors that are required by smartphones and tablets these days. Nonetheless, Intel still dreams of landing up that dream contract with Apple, and their belief is getting more stronger thanks to the most recent exchange between the companies where Apple launched new MacBook Pros and iMacs making use of Intel's high-speed Thunderbolt I/O platform and the latest Sandy Bridge processors.
Kilroy taunts: "Go look at the performance of those platforms. They're taking our latest and high-end end versions of second-generation core, and ARM doesn't even come close to any capability there."
At present, Intel is just happy with what it already has, and is just aiming to improve their own technology and they'll eventually reap the fruit.
"There's a lot of experimentation that goes on and we'll see how it plays out. We're eager to understand what usage models become popular," Kilroy said. "We're just happy we're the architecture of choice."
Apple and Intel have been friends for six years now when the Mac maker dumped PowerPC processors in favor of Intel-manufactured silicon.
A big sales volume of Apple products would also mean major revenue for component sellers — so who wouldn't want to partner Apple?
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