Apple "Pushing Intel in New Directions"


TMCNet reports that Apple has helped reshape Intel's thinking.

""They push us to think about things that we may not always think about," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group, who is quoted in the article. "We were hoping for that to happen and that certainly happened."

Intel is primarily interested in Apple's ideas about the evolving PC market and this, in turn, affects Intel's product roadmap, Chandrasekher notes. But the company is thinking long-term about its strategy, and the influence of Apple will not be immediately visible in the short term.

The most practical element of Apple's influence on Intel products has been in the area of heat dissipation for laptop processors. Apple could never shoehorn a G5 processor into the 1" thin enclosure of the PowerBook. Consequently, it turned to Intel's Core Duo, but Chandrasekher also acknowledges that Apple emphasized thermals and packaging to Intel to keep down the heat in the tightly-restricted space available in notebook computers. The results are MacBook and MacBook Pro which deliver desktop performance in mobile packages.

Analysis: Could be some nice Intel PR guff, but so far there seems to be a good vibe between the two companies. They have worked well together before (witness Star Trek in the early 1990s), and one always gets the sense that Intel sometimes thought of the Mac OS as 'Plan B'.