AMD is fabless, so what they bring is an SOC design. But what can they offer in an SOC other companies can't? I guess Hypertransport?

System level design, integration with gpgpu. Inspite of being dwarfed by Intel in the x86 space I would imagine AMD has the engineering bandwidth to compete with the current arm based designers - qualcomm and samsung.

Rumor is that Apple's design team is bigger than AMD's at this point.

Apple isn't thinking about entering the OEM SoC market though.

Apple is in a league of their own.

Perhaps they are fabless for the moment, but that might not last forever.

See here:

http://m.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2006/06/19/daily53.h...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/-1-Billion-In-NYS-Funding-For-...

http://www.saratoga.com/news/amd-chip-plant.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Forest_Technology_Campus

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20130904235756_Gl...

Those are all old sources, if I recall correctly AMD spun off there fabs to GlobalFoundries then recently divest their stake.

Radeon gpu cores. We already see Qualcomm Adreno gpus doing well and they are a fork of old ATI blueprints that AMD sold them.