Apple has started making a lot of different things in house, its only a matter of time imo.
Define "making". Sure, they design a lot of stuff in-house (CPUs/SoCs, wireless chipsets, etc), but they do not manufacture these things in-house: they have no fabs themselves.
And it's not about motivation, but capacity: everything is currently at 100%. To get more capacity means building more fabs, and given the historically cyclical nature of semiconductors not may people want to necessarily take that risk (potentially end up with over capacity). And it wouldn't help now, as it takes >2 years to build a fab.
Unless the suggestion is for Apple to design M- and A-series CPUs with the memory circuitry in-die instead of on-package? (Using up some 'transistor budget' for RAM.)
I don’t understand why that’s so hard to understand and I certainly don’t think Apple will hesitate with a new technocrat CEO coming in September 2026, if Apple had a “slug” MBA person coming in September, I might buy the argument that they may not do anything but they have shown that they are capable of playing the long game when necessary.
I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall 5-6 years ago to see what the conversation was like on Hacker News when rumors of Apple replacing Intel came up. I bet it was much of the same. Oh no, don’t do anything.
But who knows. Their unified memory architecture across core types already puts them in a different design space. Maybe that design space leads them to further opportunities for memory architecture differentiation.
I could see them (1) taking the two processing chips that make up an Ultra in coming generations, (2) fabbed with logic on top, and power distributed on the back side, as Intel is going for, and (3) sandwiching the logic sides around a layer of unified RAM, with (4) massive optical linking distributed across the surfaces, resulting in (5) unbelievable bandwidths and parallelism we couldn't dream of today.
And then, (6) announcing it at WWDC 2029 and (7) taking my money 5 minutes after the midnight when pre-order's start.
You certainly could do try a 20bn cell SRAM, in 155mm^2, if you could handle the routing, but the power consumption might surprise you.
It’ll probably only be worth it if it enables something “new” like more bigger Ultra chips or something.
does Apple have enough of a design moat to overcome eventual overprice compared to competitors when "outisde" production is 2,4,10x cheaper
does Apple have enough of income/savings to maintain internal production capacity if it decides to switch back to outside sources
or can Apple acquire enough fab competence to negate internal/external price difference
we'll see how it plays out
SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron?
They should be banned.
[1] A “strategic” expense is named like this when you can’t justify it by any rational means.