Asked about the prospect of Apple using its own chips in the Mac rather than those from his company, Intel's CEO says the company is probably always looking at whether such a move makes sense.

"As an engineer I think they'd be foolish not to do that test," Brian Krzanich said at Code Conference on Thursday. "We always look at it as a competitive battle we have to win. "Our job is to make our products so compelling – the power the battery life."

Krzanich said he had no inside knowledge, though.

"They're not going to open that project up to me if they do have it," he said.

But... Krzanich can take a bit of comfort, perhaps, in comments Apple executives made earlier this year's saying the company had no plans to move to its ARM chips as the main processor for the Mac, though it has started using them as companion processors.

Historical context: Apple had OS X running on Intel chips years before it made the switch from PowerPC processors. I would be surprised if there isn't a similar project at Apple. Besides, iOS is a version of OS X and it already runs on Apple's chips.