Intel Looks to Apple for Future Tech Direction

There's no denying that Apple has a profound influence on the modern tech industry. Even for consumers who make an conscious decision to not purchase products from the company, Apple's products often influence what the rest of the tech industry brings to market.

For the most part, Apple's influence is just on consumer end goods, but now it's starting to trickle upwards. At the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York, Intel senior vice president Tom Kilroy said that Apple is now helping the world's largest chipmaker shape its roadmaps.

"We work very closely with them and we're constantly looking down the road at what we can be doing relative to future products. I'd go as far as to say Apple helps shape our roadmap," Kilroy said.

"Apple -- they push us hard," he said.

Since Apple's switch away from PowerPC, it's been pure Intel inside the Mac family. There have been rumors that AMD is working hard to get inside a Mac, but so far the closest thing has been Radeon GPUs.

Another potential threat is ARM, whose CPU IP have been the driving force that's propelled Apple so far forward with the iPhone and iPad products. Intel isn't worried about ARM just yet though.

"Go look at the performance of those platforms. They're taking our latest and high-end end versions of second-generation core, and ARM doesn't even come close to any capability there," Kilroy said.