How great is it that Trump requires Apple to do business with Intel
Intel is one of the top three semiconductor manufacturers in the world. If a company wants to practice the sound engineering principle of second sourcing they are a top choice.
It's a good idea in principle. If Intel can actually catch up. Otherwise, it will be like the cellular modems, where Apple second-sourced from Intel, and the product was crap, so some devices had noticeably degraded performance compared with the ones that contained Qualcomm radios.
Please, please, please let it be Apple's main processors.
TSMC has a high volume process lead over Intel. Apple will probably use Intel for older CPUs going into lower end machines and devices.
Except that they would have to presumably reengineer the old silicon for Intel's process, which kind of defeats the purpose of reusing old designs to save money, I would think.
Plus, CPUs are not the only chips that Apple needs. Not all chips need the latest process.
I think you're on the right track with that one. Apple uses a lot of CPUs that aren't the main CPU. For example, every current MacBook Pro has a T2 security chip that handles encryption. The next generation of that could be designed to be manufacturable on multiple processes; it is currently built on a 16nm process.
Apple also uses CPUs in things like the Apple Watch, where absolute performance isn't as much of a factor as temperature and power consumption. I'm pretty sure Intel is already able to make chips in volume that beat the 4nm process that they use for those.
