More Intel inside iPad, iPhone

Like Google and Apple, Intel is burning through its cash reserve to purchase companies that mean big sales in the future. These acquisitions are likely to put more and more Intel parts into Apple products.

Intel just purchased Infineon’s wireless division for $1.4 billion, putting the future of Intel solidly in the mobile computing market. In a column yesterday, we outlined the meaning of this purchase for Intel’s future. Infineon has long been a supplier to handset builders such as Apple, Nokia, and Samsung, and currently ranks as the fourth largest supplier of cellular-broadband components in the world, according to a CNET story. This purchase diversifies Intel into a different field, a few degrees away from its bread and butter business of PC processors and into communications chips (think G, 4G, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc.), working toward a processor that has these communications functions embedded on the same chip.

Apple is already dependent on Intel for the CPUs that power its desktop and laptop computers like the iMac and MacBook lines. Now, Intel will own Infineon wireless, which has been selling Apple the chips used to connect their iPad and iPhone mobile devices to wireless networks. Apple, however, is on an acquisitions quest of its own, having purchased companies that allowed it to bring the iPad to market with an Apple-built CPU at its heart. Will Apple now be in the market for companies that are in the wireless chip business, so that it can bring this mobile-critical hardware in-house?

If Apple does not look toward the production of its own wireless silicon, they will be increasingly dependent on Intel to supply chips for its mobile products. As we have seen with iPad and iPhone CPUs, Apple gives every indication of wanting to control as much of its supply chain is possible. Should we look forward the the acquisition of wireless chip companies by Apple, or should we expect to see “Intel Inside” stickers on our next iPhones?

• 

• Intel Developer Forum acting as foreshadowing for new Macs
• The billion dollar Apple iPad processor
• Where might that iPad processor take Apple?
• Apple’s iPad 2 and iPhone 5 to have NFC
• Mid 2010 MacBook Pro: Lots o’ changes on the inside