I care about performance in my phone too, so where can I buy an Intel phone?

The truth is that my phone doesn't have to be the fastest; it just has to be fast enough in balance with other factors important to me (size, battery life, etc).

And the same goes with my laptop. I currently have an MBP with an i7 processor, and I'm a web developer - it's overkill. I also play games with it now and then, but it's clear that the iGPU is the bottleneck there and not the processor. Very rarely do I do heavy compiling or video encoding or other CPU-maxing tasks on this thing.

So would I trade the i7 for an A-series plus a couple more hours of battery life and/or a lower (or at least not further increased, damn it Apple) price? Yes, I would take that trade, and probably never suffer for it.

I've had Intel phones running Android. For example the Asus ZenFone as mentioned below, also the Lenovo K80. [0] I also used to have a Motorola RAZR ages ago, that I think was one of the first Intel powered phones? Not just phones, watches with x86 series Intel CPUs exist! The Tag Modular 45 [2] has an Intel Atom Z3400 [3] in it...

0. https://www.gsmarena.com/lenovo_k80-7216.php

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i

2. https://www.tagheuer.com/en-us/watches/tag-heuer-connected-m...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(system_on_chip)

Why you bought a laptop with an i7 then in the first place? There are already more energy efficient alternatives - i5, i3, core m.

I have a theory that probably when Apple will release a laptop with their own SoC it will be more expensive...

Because it checked the other boxes I was looking for with regards to screen size, memory, and so on.

Perhaps an A-series laptop would be more expensive for consumers (damn it, Apple), but I don't think it would cost more for Apple to manufacture, since they can do so much more of it in house.

Asus Zenfone smartphones use Intel processors.

While I agree with you that we almost certainly won't see an ARM macintosh, I wouldn't be surprised to see an ARM laptop exclusively running iOS at some point. We probably will see an ARM core with single threaded performance in Intel's realm once Intel is fully backed against the wall that is the end of Moore's law. It'll probably always be slower than an intel core if it has to emulate x64, but the iOS ecosystem gives Apple control of it's on chips in a world after the commodification high performance chips.

> an ARM laptop exclusively running iOS

So an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard? Apple already sells those!

It's a little more than a stretch to refer to a current iPad with Bluetooth keyboard as a laptop. But sure, it shows how Apple is inching in that direction.

Well, it's a stretch for me to consider iOS as a usable laptop OS, so I guess we're both stretching. :P

But to play the devil's advocate, how is it not sufficiently laptop-ish for you? Because the keyboard is detachable? Because it has a touchscreen?

I think it will morph into a usable laptop OS as Apple pushes it into that direction.

> But to play the devil's advocate, how is it not sufficiently laptop-ish for you? Because the keyboard is detachable? Because it has a touchscreen?

Lack of a mouse equivalent. Having to move your hands off the keyboard to do anything other than type is a pain in the ass.

"Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else"

The point of the article is that ThunderX is claimed to be faster than Xeon Gold for HPC applications.

I see one HPC application where ThunderX 30% is faster (TeaLeaf). For the others shown, it's neck-and-neck with the Xeon. Reaching parity with Xeon is admittedly impressive even on this subset of applications, but it doesn't look consistently faster based on the information presented. I'm personally interested in how this system stacks up for quantum chemistry (GAMESS, NWChem, PySCF, Psi4...) and I hope that more benchmarks will become available soon.

But no where near single threaded performance.

ARM is a bit of a misnomer, there are many segments, Cortex M, Cortex A. Only the "A" series could be considered intel/amd class I guess.

But yes, arm cores are everywhere.