Sinofsky argues custom silicon requires a scale of one billion devices.
Steven Sinofsky · a16z Podcast | Apple and the Case of Invisible But Audible Innovation · Jan 2, 2019 · at 32:21
Steven Sinofsky, former Microsoft Windows president and tech executive, discusses hardware platform unit economics and Apple's semiconductor strategy in 2016.
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“Custom chips have always been a competitive disadvantage. For a company in particular, they were a very deep competitive disadvantage for Apple when the run rate for Motorola chips went down and they couldn't sustain it. And then they made the same mistake with the power PC chip where that run rate declined and there wasn't enough of an ecosystem to support the chip. And now when you have a billion devices, all of a sudden there's an ecosystem and it's becoming for the very first time viable for a company to have its own custom chips at this unit run rate.”
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