The Apple Channel

October 22, 2008

It seems like just yesterday -- well, roughly 1,230 yesterdays, anyway -- that Apple and Intel became BFFs with Steve Jobs' June 6, 2005 announcement that Apple would build Macs with Intel processors.

Flash forward just a couple years into that partnership and Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is now apparently bashing Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple's hugely popular iPhones for using an ARM processor, according to ZDNet Australia:

"The shortcomings of the iPhone are not because of Apple," Intel's director of ecosystems for its Ultra-Mobility Group Pankaj Kedia said at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, Taiwan. "The shortcomings of the iPhone have come from ARM."

Kedia and Shane Wall, another Intel Ultra-Mobility Group exec, went on to say Tuesday that smartphone processors not based on the chip giant's x86 architecture can't run "the full Internet" and result in smartphones that are "not very smart," ZDNet Australia reports.

Those comments from Kedia and Wall at IDF Taipei come on the heels of some direct and indirect lobs thrown Intel's way by Jobs and Apple in the past few weeks. During Apple's fourth-quarter earnings call, also on Tuesday, Jobs repeated earlier statements pooh-poohing the "netbook" category, which Intel markets aggressively, going so far as to say, "We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that."

A week earlier, Apple unveiled its latest line of MacBook laptop computers. The big news, long-anticipated but not confirmed until the launch, was that a graphics chipset from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia would be replacing integrated graphics from Intel in the latest Apple notebooks. Intel still supplies the central processors for Apple's mobile PC lineup -- the chip maker's latest Core 2 Duo mobile chips, in fact -- but losing the graphics had to sting.

The latest iPhone tussle isn't the first time the two computing giants have clashed over Apple's signature smartphone.

Processors based on the ARM architecture power the vast majority of smartphones on the market today. But Intel in recent years has sunk considerable resources into developing ultra-low-power and embedded "system-on-a-chip" platforms for such devices, based on its own x86 architecture. Intel contends that x86-based devices deliver a far better Internet experience than ARM-based devices because the Web itself was built on and for x86-based personal computers.

In Taipei this week, Intel demoed a working version of its first major x86 platform for consumer electronics devices, code named Moorestown.

Sounds like Moorestown would be perfect for next-gen iPhones and iPods, doesn't it? Not so fast. As CNET's Tom Krazit points out:

[Intel] probably thought that it could one day win Apple over to its side when the Moorestown chip arrived, and it was still smitten with its hot new paramour that made old lovers Dell and HP look impossibly lame.

Unfortunately for the prospects of Moorestown or any x86 platform landing in an iPhone or iPod any time soon, Apple this past April acquired P.A. Semi, a designer of ARM processors, to develop chips for future generations of those products.

So forget a seven-year itch -- Apple and Intel seem to be getting pretty antsy with each other after a little more than three.