"The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem," says Piednoël during a casual Xplane chat and stream session. "It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad.
"When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place."
Okay, but this doesn't explain why they didn't move to amd instead. Changing architecture like this is not cheap.
Besides, Apple just pissed off the entire software industry. Assume you are Adobe or Abelton and now have to spend serious money to very quickly port your software to arm64 without getting any new sales.
I would guess that Apple always had plans to switch to their own arm cpus. Perhaps what happened is that their experience with Intel was so bad that they chose to accelerate those plans, rather than have to deal with AMD.
Most likely Apple has a contract with Intel for some kind of deal on the price, so switching to AMD would incur a round of lawyers and negotiations to get a similar price. That doesn't come for free, so if they had other plans in the works, it would make sense to move faster rather than try and do something for a short period of time.
Adobe's job is to do their part and make software. With this switch, Apple is giving Adobe higher quality hardware to work with.
And Apple is providing emulation layer for free.
On a more seriously note, I dont see it has anything to do with the QA. Intel were still quick to response and fix whatever problem they discovered.
But they are now 4 years behind their own schedule and still charging for the same price. 4 years is a very long time in tech industry. And if there are any company that had pricing power against Apple, it was Intel ( and may be Qualcomm. ) And Apple dont like that.
First, they are Apple and given the opportunity to have one Arm for it all, there is always an attraction to rule them all with one Arm. (Microsoft trying decades.)
It is not a matter if but when.
But I think if Intel is ok, ... still the pic of two bridges to sanfranc is not come out today.
"When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place."