NeXT? But yes, I completely get what you’re saying, I just couldn’t resist. It was an amazingly long sighted strategic move, for sure.
MeeGo proceeded far too slowly and Elop chose his former employers' Windows instead in 2011. Nokia's decline only increased and Intel hired many Nokia engineers.
Soon Nokia made no phone anymore and Intel did not even manage to make their first mass-selling product.
ARM-based SoCs were 10 years ahead in power saving. The ARM ecosystem did not make any fatal mistakes, Intel never caught up.
To me the Atom team always felt like a dead-end inside intel - everyone seemed to be trying to get in to a different higher-status team ASAP - our engineering contacts often changed monthly, if we even knew who our "contacts" were meant to be at any time. I think any product developed like that would struggle.
how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?
I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sleeve", that the iPaq slid into, not the other way around. Could run the ASR engine for about whole 10 mins before it drained the battery flat, haha. :-)
The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.
Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?
A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).
CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…
They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.
See Lunar Lake on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM versus the M3 on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM: https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q?t=531
The 258V (TSMC N3B) has a worse perf / W 1T curve than the Apple M1 (TSMC N5).
Also, there's the obvious benefits of being TSMC's best customer. And when you design a chip for low power consumption, that means you've got a higher ceiling when you introduce cooling.
No, the main reason for better battery life is the RISC architecture. PC on ARM architecture has the same gains.
Im not wrong!
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die
All instructions across x86 and Arm are being decoded to micro-operations, which are implementation specific. You could have an implementation which prioritizes performance, or an implementation that prioritizes power consumption, regardless of the ISA.
Decoding instructions, particularly on a modern die, doesn’t consume a significant amount of area or power, even for complicated variable length instructions.
If all that's true then why does Snapdragon have better battery life? As I said in my comment the great battery life comes from when the CPU isn't being used. It's everything else around it. That's where AMD is still significantly behind.
Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.
Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.