

Why Apple won’t dump Intel x86 for its own ARM chips in MacBooks and the Mac Pro - nkurz
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/187513-why-apple-wont-dump-intel-x86-for-its-own-arm-chips-in-macbooks-and-the-mac-pro

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fidotron
It is amazing how defensive (perhaps necessarily) the Intel crowd are,
especially around the problems caused by the ISA. If the ISA really is
insignificant to power consumption then why exactly have x86 devices struggled
against ARM, especially on the same manufacturing process? They've been
saying, literally, for years that they're going to sort it with the next batch
but it just isn't happening. As the rest of the industry has narrowed the
process gap the squeeze has got worse, forcing them into premature advances in
order to stay competitive.

It's tempting to start drawing comparisons between Intel of today and IBM or
Motorola of 2005. It's bizarre how much of the tech media seem to think
PowerPC to Intel somehow lacked any of the problems an Intel to ARM transition
might have, when Apple's frankly amazing execution of it made it look
remarkably simple. The reality is a lot of the so called problems, especially
around software, not only have theoretical solutions, but solutions the same
company has used for almost exactly the same purpose in the not too distant
past.

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higherpurpose
All the "research" is also misleading. Atom can barely keep up with ARM in CPU
and GPU performance as well as power consumption, but with one and a half
process nodes advantage (22nm Trigate vs planar 28nm). Plus, Atom is being
heavily subsidized. It's even worse from a price/performance point of view
with the bigger chips. Core i5 is 3x more powerful (I think more like 2x if
we're comparing the one in Macbook Air), but costs 10x as much.

