Re:Intel's disruption is now complete
by dboreham on Saturday November 14, 2020 @08:59PM
(#25097503)
Well ok but by that theory Dec Alpha or HP PA should have dominated?
Neither had the underlying single enormous vertically integrated market slice.
Apple has and had the iPhone. Apple started using their own chips, the A5, about 10 years ago. (In 2011 March, starting with the iPad 2. And they used ARM before that too.) And since then Apple optimized the "supply chain", incremental steps, but when you are Apple every step can be almost revolutionary (and year after year Steve told exactly that to the believers, and it's basically true, just not on actual feature front, but on hardware and systems level - eg. Gorilla glass for the phones, power efficiency, the oversized battery for the MBP, milling, machining, marketing, design, and so on).
The 5 Watt iPhone CPU almost beats the 45 Watt AMD CPU. And the M1 will then simply obliterate the x86 incumbents.
Why? The real reason is that Apple had/has the real advantage. It's size, resources, money, strategy, know-how.
It's bigger than Intel. It has a better corporate culture than Intel, it has a vertically integrated market completely safe from any outside disruption for years, and will be for years. It had the opportunity to do this switch, so it had the motivation to develop this capability.
Apple was able to hire the best semi designers plus benefit from the ARM platform.
AMD is still too small and relatively spread thin - trying to cover multiple segments of the general market - compared to Apple, which basically has this one chip in two versions (mobile and ultra mobile).