Intel CPU woes forced Apple to design own processor claims ex-employee
Bad quality assurance of Skylake processors to blame
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
It appears thatApple’s decision todevelop its own ARM-based processor for Macs and MacBookswas due in part to Intel’s well-documented struggles with itsSkylakeCPUs a few years back.
The claim comes from formerIntelprincipal engineer François Piednoël (asreported by PC Gamer), who claims that the “bad quality assurance of Skylake” solidified Apple’s decision to use its own silicon, which the company finally confirmed at itsWWDCevent.
Apple having complete control over both the hardware and software of its Macs and MacBooks, as it does with its iPhones and iPads (which run on Apple-designed chips) makes a lot of sense, and was something the company had been considering for some time; however, according to Piednoël, Intel’s issues with its Skylake processors are what finally made Apple decide to part ways (at least, partially) with the chip-maker.
Spilling the beans
According to Piednoël, the quality assurance of Skylake was “abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake”, and “Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad”.
While this is just the view of a single ex-Intel employee, what they’re saying does make sense. After all, if a processor is causing Macs and MacBooks to encounter issues, Apple’s customers are going to start blaming Apple – and that wouldn’t have gone down well.
Last year we also sawApple blaming Intel’s processor shortage for slump in Mac sales, and at the time we thought that could make Apple more keen to come up with its own chips, rather than relying on a third party.
That, along with Piednoël’s claim that the Skylake problems were “where the Apple guys who were always contemplating to switch… looked at it and said: ’Well, we’ve probably got to do it’,” hints at Apple’s interest in moving to its ownARM-based chips.
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Again, though, this is all the opinion of one ex-employee. It’s also worth noting that when Apple announced it was developing its own chips, CEOTim Cookstressed that the company was “very excited“ about future Intel-based devices.
For its part, Intel has told us that “Apple is a customer across several areas of business, and we will continue to support them.“
Matt is TechRadar’s Managing Editor for Core Tech, looking after computing and mobile technology. Having written for a number of publications such as PC Plus, PC Format, T3 and Linux Format, there’s no aspect of technology that Matt isn’t passionate about, especially computing and PC gaming. He’s personally reviewed and used most of the laptops in our best laptops guide - and since joining TechRadar in 2014, he’s reviewed over 250 laptops and computing accessories personally.
Trying to get the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU? It seems only scalpers have it and they’re jacking up the price
As if Intel didn’t have enough to worry about, Nvidia might be about to jump into the PC processor market
How to turn off Meta AI
