Nobody could pretend that Apple was not way ahead of everyone else in terms of chip design capability and design sophistication. Right up to that point Samsung and Qualcom had been telling everyone they had all the experience and Apple was a newbie at this chip design stuff that didn't know what it was doing.
All of a sudden they were faced with the reality. If they could do 64 bit a year before anyone else, they could do anything a year before anyone else. They could ship working products that other teams barely had on the drawing board, which means nobody could reasonably predict anything they could do next. How can you design a flagship phone for next year to compete with them, when you have no clue what features are even possible for them to have? That's what it brought to the table.
IIRC, it was Apple who asked Samsung to collaborate with Intrinsity, most known for their FAST tech, to develop the Hummingbird core which was used in both Samsung and Apple's AP's. Only after having tested Intrinsity's tech, Apple acquired it -- so it's a bit stretch to agree with your narrative Samsung didn't see what was coming. Apple also took their time developing and releasing their own first AP about 4 years later. It also seems like while Apple is focusing on the single-core performance as their marketing point, Qualcomm and others are focusing on power-saving, having first implemented multi-core, then octo-cores on their chips. I'm not sure if that's a surprise or unexpected, since Apple's AP remained a single-core AP for a while.
As for the 64bit, was there any compelling reason to go 64bit mobile? I remember when I used to work for wall street banks in the 1990's, the shortcomings of the 32bit arch limited our ability to scale and SUN's UltraSPARC which was widely used by in the industry came to relieve that problem.
The main attraction for 64-bit ARM is, apart from the obvious future proofing, it has a redesigned and much more efficient ISA. It also has the optional secure enclave feature which Apple used for TouchID and now FaceID. That feature doesn't actually require 64-bit per se, but it is only a feature of the 64-bit ARM architecture. As an aside, is anyone else using it for anything? I'm only aware of Apple using it, but technically it's not an Apple exclusive feature.
Your 'focused on power saving' point is correct as far as it goes, that was their intent, but unfortunately the power saving benefits of BIGLittle turned out to be much more modest and full of caveats than hoped. It turns out that a fast efficient single core that can complete an instruction in less time, then quickly shut down into a power saving mode, is more efficient in power terms for most cases than a slower lower powered core taking longer. As a result Apple's fewer faster cores approach turned out to actually offer better power efficiency as well. Since then Apple has also adopted BIGLittle, it's not a failed technology, it's just that the inflection point when it becomes worth doing was at a very different point than previously realised. Whether thats down to luck or judgement on Apple's part is moot.
> The main attraction for 64-bit ARM is, apart from the obvious future proofing ...
ok
> unfortunately the power saving benefits of BIGLittle turned out to be much more modest and full of caveats than hoped ... As a result Apple's fewer faster cores approach turned out to actually offer better power efficiency as well.
Sure, I'm guessing you are comparing some very early implementation of bigLITTLE by Samsung in 2012 versus Apple's single core. Or are you denying the power efficiency benefit of multi-core architecture in mobile processors (or non-mobile processor for that matter)? It's one thing to criticize Samsung's very early, first and second iterations of big.LITTLE chips in 2012, which was highly workload dependent, but it's completely another to claim Apple's single-core superiority over multi-core power-efficiency, including those non-octo core Samsung AP's. Perhaps you can substantiate this with some references?
You are off by a decade[0] on the date of the acquisition.
I use my phone relatively heavily, and I still get better battery life with an iPhone because the passive energy usage is just so damn low.
64-bit enables a number of other things. It has a better ABI for argument passing. It allows more extensive use of tagged pointers (the ObjC runtime can fit many common 11-char or shorter strings in a single tagged pointer). It's also a chance to make any other ABI-breaking changes you want to make in the runtime.
If you're forward looking you might say that mobile devices will exceed the 2GB/4GB limit soon enough so why not make the change now rather than waiting for it to become a problem? You'd get all the performance benefits listed above and a future-proof foundation on which to build.
Parent is wrong though, the A7 has 3-wide cores (and dual-core like previous chips)
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarch...
Bloomberg also seems to think that the A4 was Apple's first processor designed in-house, when Intrinsity was not part of Apple. So I'd like to know how much of Apple's own engineering went into the design of the A4, that wasn't Samsung or Intrinsity.
It's also stating that Apple could topple Qualcomm… despite Apple not selling to third parties, the only way that'd happen is if they obtained a complete monopoly on the smartphone market. I don't see either happen.
These are the events which genuinely placed Apple on a serious footing as a chip designer, the A4 was Apple-branded but only a preparatory step.
The essay also lacks other silicon acquisition of Apple, like Intrinsity, whose work actually showed up as early as the A4 (before it was acquired).
It's also oddly padding the timeline with X-variants.