If they could just turn up the TDP and clock speed on their chips and get 2x the performance of Intel's best chips that easily- they would already own the entire desktop market.

And some of us, with actual CPU design backgrounds, have been saying that for a while now.

We've been asking why Apple doesn't already do it.

As someone without a CPU design backround, would something like this scale pretty linearly with added power and thermal headroom? I assume there are limit that would have to be overcome, but what would an ARM chip in the conditions of an i7 look like?

TDP typically scales as somewhere between the cube and fourth power of the clock speed if you're pushing the envelope (in the sense of running at frequencies where further frequency increase also needs a voltage increase). So having 10x the thermal envelope means you can probably clock about twice as fast, all else being equal.

It's more of a logarithmic scale.

The same architecture can generally scale to 10x over a few process generations.

This does not hold at 10nm and below.

Seems that it’s more of a logistical and network-effect issue in getting everyone to support it, rather than a technical issue.

Possibly a patent issue also

My only question is if they actually use ARM for their next-generation architecture, or something completely new...