Being able to go toe to toe with low-power areas says little about being able to compete against full-power areas, and vice versa. Intel is a laughing stock when trying to compete in low power areas even though they dominate full power. ARM is the only choice in low power outside of a few Chinese chips and Samsung's Exynos, but yet ARM hasn't made a dent in full power applications. The two areas do not scale as easily as they sound.

Intel has been iterating their design decades longer and was in stiff competition for much of that time period. They will be hard to catch in the desktop/laptop space for anyone starting with a cell phone CPU.

ARM has not had real competition in their market, most chipmakers are licensing ARM tech, so they should be easier to catch up to, which Apple has done (with a healthy dose of borrowed ideas from ARM).

You do realize Exynos and the Apple A-series are both ARM processors. They didn’t “borrow” ideas from ARM, they licensed the IP and are fundamentally just better implementations of the base line IP with a few things added on.

Isn't Exynos also ARM?

You're right, for some reason I was thinking Exynos wasn't ARM based because it wasn't Qualcomm- not sure why. That takes the list of ARM competition down to just the Chinese offerings, unless I'm mistaken about that.

The trade offs for a SoC are different than for a desktop machine, and to a lesser extent a laptop. The desktop is where we'll feel the most pain. I wouldn't be surprised if they cancelled the Mac Pro entirely.

It would surprise me, because they made a big public show of recommitting to the Mac Pro last year.

If they had any doubts all they had to do was say nothing -- which is their strong preference -- and it would have remained clear that the Mac Pro was dead.

Making a strong "trust us, we're working on it" statement and then canceling would be a pretty bad unforced error. Not impossible, but with their top-down, forward-looking decison-making process it seems very unlikely to me.

Given the failure of ARM in the datacenter Apple would be pulling something off that no other semi manufacturer has. It's not impossible but just very unlikely.

It's much more reasonable that they'll do a "best effort" in the high end space but it won't be comparable to a Xeon. You can see the iMac Pro as a prelude to that. A beefy machine to be sure but not what you'd expect for top of the line.

It really depends on what exactly Apple is intending to do, which we just don't know yet.

But if they really are committed to the Mac Pro (and if this rumor is essentially true), then they must be planning something pretty extraordinary:

1. They actually have a solid plan on how they are going to make CPUs competitive with Intel Xeons over the next ~2-4 years.

2. They're planing on a bifurcated line, where some Macs have Apple CPUs and some have Intel CPUs... presumably with different architectures. I guess 2b. would be that the Apple CPUs will actually be x64 compatible.

It all seems pretty crazy, but Apple has done this kind of thing before, and done it rather smoothly. I guess time will tell.

The simplest explanation is that they aren't that committed to the high end. They don't make any money there and they've proven with their actions it is not a priority. A few quotes to the contrary don't change the fundamentals of what they've been doing.