I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Apple's Ax processors are manufactured by other companies (mostly Samsung) but they're designed by Apple, in-house. They started doing so after the acquisition of PWRficient.

They are indeed different from the CPUs used by other smartphone manufacturers.

Of course, Apple "designs" the exact same Cortex-A9 and PowerVR cores as everyone else. (I'll give them some credit if they are first with A15.) Qualcomm is arguably more innovative given that Krait, Adreno, and the baseband are all in-house.

Remember that it's another ARM based SOC; as a percentage of gates it would surprise me if Apple's input was more than a percent.

I also suspect that most of the speed and power gains come from process improvements.

I'm sorry you are so brainwashed by Apple marketing. Apple's Ax line is using reference ARM designs, with negligible modifications.

Manufactured? Yes. Designed? No. Of course, their processors are ARM based, but that doesn't mean that they just stick a reference design in there and hope for the best. A lot of work goes into the design and Apple bought P.A. Semi and Intrinsity and acquired a 9.5% stake in Imagination Technologies, the folks behind PowerVR for that very purpose. Blithely declaring that Apple don't design their chips is somewhat wide of the mark.

I don't know how these acquisitions are relevant at all given that all dissections of A-series chips revealed reference ARM Cortex designs underneath. At best Apple design packaging of these chips, but that's 1% of work.

Your just outright wrong. All of the companies that design SoC's put a heck of a lot of work into the design of the chip. Saying that it's mere packaging is simple mindedness at it's best.

lol