Apple Inc. is designing its own central processing unit chips to replace Intel Corp. chips in its Mac computers as soon as 2020, according to a report published Monday.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the plans, said the initiative, code-named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages. It’s part of an overall strategy by Apple to make all of its devices work more similarly and seamlessly together.

Apple famously switched to Intel processors in 2006 after having previously shipped Macs with IBM Corp.’s PowerPC processors. At the time, the move was justified because the PowerPC processors were slipping behind Intel’s chips. A dozen years later, the company’s non-Mac products all run custom-designed Apple chips based on technology from Arm Holdings Plc.

“We think that Apple is looking at ways to further integrate their hardware and software platforms, and they’ve clearly made some moves in this space, trying to integrate iOS and macOS,” Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research, told Bloomberg. “It makes sense that they’re going in this direction. If you look at incremental R&D spend, it’s gone into ways to try to vertically integrate their components so they can add more functionality for competitive differentiation.”

Others took a different take on the report, however. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE that although he believes Apple has the ability to make a Macbook based on its own chips, he thinks it’s more of a negotiating tactic than anything else.

“Bringing Apple chips to macOS would probably be more trouble and churn than Apple would want,” Moorhead added. “IOS is strategic to Apple [while] macOS is not.”

Regardless of whether Apple is seriously considering switching its Mac line to its own chips, the prospect was enough to scare Intel investors, since Apple provides about 5 percent of Intel’s annual revenue. Intel shares dropped 6 percent in regular trading, closing at $48.92, down $3.16.

The price drop may not have been entirely driven by the Apple chip report, however. Fears of a trade war with China along with other matters caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop 458 points, and the Nasdaq fell 3 percent by the close of trading Monday.

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