Nobody is even close to touching intel in its niche of high single chip preformance at reasonable power usage. PPC was way way behind when it got replaced.

Not true; Apple's own A-series silicon is starting to be a serious threat. For instance, the A10 in the iPhone 7 now beats all Intel chips ever shipped in MacBook Airs in single-core CPU benchmarks. Right now, today. And it's less than 3 years behind vs. Intel CPUs in the MacBook Pro. It also beats the Mac Pro's 12-core Xeon (from 2013) in single-core.

This despite the A10 running on FAR less power.

Apple's definitely within shouting distance and is a serious threat to just replace Intel entirely, at least for its own needs.

Achieving the same level of performance with ARM is only half the story.

Apple has to surpass the Core i series to make any sense to switch.

And then there's the whole clusterfuck that would be porting all the x86 software to ARM. When Apple switched to Intel emulation of Power PC was usable via Rosetta but AFAIK emulation of x86 with ARM is extremely slow.

I wonder whether it could be possible for Apple to build in a hardware accelerator for the x86 emulator into the chip?

...Though at that point I suppose they'd basically be building an x86 co-processor into it. No idea if that would actually help performance or not.

I have really hard time believing those benchmarks claiming a mobile processor beating a recent desktop CPU. It all came from a few tweets without real numbers. Show us a real benchmark.

At the same clock speed, it's on average 25% faster according to http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?p=278368#post2... . The caveat (and the rest of the thread) make for interesting reading.

Everyone is waiting with baited breath for a A-series Macbook (maybe call it the iBook again, to solidify "i" as personal/consumer line as opposed to "Pro")

Sure, but I think we'll see MacBooks using Apple SoC's in the future:

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-mac...

Apple already abandoned the market this review is talking about. They don't ship desktops any more. As the article makes clear (not in the headline, obviously) Kaby Lake actually does have a bunch of improvements for mobile applications.

>Kaby Lake actually does have a bunch of improvements for mobile applications.

If only getting a hold of their mobile processors wasn't so difficult because they're OEM parts. Perfect for things like fanless mini-ITX media center builds.

Then again, Intel will be refreshing its NUC line soon, and those tend to use mobile processors.

Apple makes a damned good mobile chip, but it's still just a mobile chip and it plays by mobile rules. Do you think apple has the expertise to switch to desktop class chip design?

Apple has made three processor transitions 68K -> PPC -> Intel. During each transition, the processor they were moving to was much faster than the previous processor. That's not the case for ARM vs Intel.

A lot of the appeal of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run Windows at native speeds. That wouldn't be possible with ARM.

Finally, Apple only sells 16-20 million Macs a year. I can't see it being worth the investment to switch to ARM and creating all of the auxiliary supporting hardware it gets to use by using standard PC hardware.

PA Semi was developing workstation/server class POWER processors before they were purchased by Apple.

What alternatives to Intel are there, even?

ARM, seriously - ok while many apps need to have an interpreter / to be compiled for the architecture - god damn for the the money and the power it shits all over x86 processors, ARM based chips are so damn cheap you /could/ chuck 6 full chips for less than the price of once x86 and of course it comes down to execution but if properly done - per watt god damn RISC based processors really do well these days, look at the latest iPhone / iPad ARM CPU - it's faster than the MacBook with the latest (one older now) intel CPU but costs less and uses 1/6th the power.

you are overstating things significantly, ARM is still way behind (an order of magnitude or more) on single thread preformance. Nobody cares about preformance per watt if it means everything lags a massive amount.

> Nobody cares about preformance per watt if it means everything lags a massive amount.

As evidenced by the fact that Intel has failed to compete in mobile, this is obviously false.

We've been hearing nonstop from message board enthusiasts that Intel is going to kill ARM for years and years now. In reality there's absolutely no sign of that happening, and in fact their recent deep cuts to the Atom line suggest the opposite.

Totally depends on the workload, well threaded workloads with a desktop ARM clock speed of 3Ghz~ or so could perform quite well for say PostgreSQL if properly deployed, but yes - for an interpreted language with a strict GIL like Python it may not perform so well; having said that, Xeon professors are dropping in clock speed each iteration, where we used to see 3+Ghz perform, it's now common to see those processors replaces with 2.2Gjz max clock speed - yes the cache can be larger, there might be more cores etc but with languages such as python you quickly run into the single core maxed out problem pretty quickly regardless.

*edit: would be interesting to see an elasticsearch cluster running on a high clock speed arm cluster... I wonder how it'd run... (and yes I know it's not that simple)

Apple's A10 silicon (from the iPhone 7) already beats Intel's 12-core Xeon from the Mac Pro in single-thread.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusi...

In a _single_ 100% synthetic benchmark. The apple chip preforms so much better than other comparable arm cores (3-4x faster) on this benchmark I view it with a lot of suspicion.

I can list about 150 programming languages that are "faster than C" if you apply similar restrictions.

http://wiki.c2.com/?AsFastAsCee

Does the A10 have 12 cores? No, it has 2 (technically has 4 but only 2 can be active at any time).

Also it's 4 year old Xeon. If you're going to compare it to a 4 year old Xeon, compare it to the 2 core versions, which will have much higher clocks.

No idea why everything automatically points to ARM. Switching away from Intel could also means to AMD.

If recent leaked benchmarks are true, AMD's Ryzen shows CPU performance similar to Intel at similar power usage. That means Apple could offer an 8 core CPU on iMac with the same price.

If Intel can't do it, who can?

And if they switch, i'd switch away from Apple.. No escape key and no X86? pshawww

You know AMD exists right? And with Ryzen coming up, it's looking pretty alright for them on the desktop front.

I don't think any consumer has known that AMD exists for over half a decade now