Daniel Howley, writing at Yahoo Finance:
Apple says a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra will outperform a Windows PC outfitted with an Intel Core i9 desktop chip and Nvidia’s formidable RTX 3090 graphics card, while consuming less overall power.
That not only means the Mac Studio will run at lower temperatures than competing PCs, but it will also maintain peak performance longer than its PC counterparts.
The M1 Ultra seems incredibly impressive, but then Howley goes on to quote Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush:
“This latest M1 Ultra is a game changer on the graphics front and ultimately is competitive versus Nvidia,” Ives said. “Now it’s about how big Apple goes outside Cupertino and selling its chip to third parties.”
Yes, Ives is suggesting that Apple would sell its custom silicon to other companies for use in their products.
I mean … has Ives ever thought about Apple for longer than about 14 seconds? Since the return of Steve Jobs, the company has done all it can to keep as much of its fate under its own control as possible.1 Apple silicon is the inevitable outcome of that mindset. To consider the company selling Apple silicon chips to the likes of NVIDIA, AMD or PC OEMs is downright laughable.2
- This includes its financial fate. There are many reasons that Apple was near death before Jobs returned, but losing Mac sales to clone makers was one of them. Today’s Apple fights tooth and nail for every dollar that passes through things like the App Store, and they wouldn’t risk hardware sales to make some money selling chips to other companies. ↩
- It’s not like Windows on Arm has gotten off the ground anyway. ↩