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I’d like to see what beast of a chip can be achieved when the power and thermal limits of a mobile phone are replaced with desktop enclosure.

I bought 5 Gigabyte branded servers with the Cavium ThunderX Dual 48 Core (96 core total) ARM processors. I thought we could just apply more cores to the problems we solve with our 64-core Opteron servers,. But alas, the cost is approximately a wash. given that on our benchmarks, each core is 1/3 the speed of the Opteron core.
 
While I would have thought that going with AMD over Intel would have bought Apple a few more years in the x86 Instruction Set, Apple felt that this change was coming eventually, so embrace it and accept the future that is entirely in their hands.

Obviously, Apple has been working towards this for the past few years. Intel failed to advance the Lake series of processors and any cache gains came at the expense of vulnerabilities that minimized those gains when patched. Remaining at 14nm while the world’s major chip fabrication companies have advanced to 7nm and even 5nm was the last straw. I’m sure Apple was feeling Déjà vu all over again like when the PowerPC was failing to produce the speed Apple wanted without using too much power and generating too much heat, prompting the transition to Intel x86.

I wouldn’t put too much on other vendors’ ARM CPUs versus Apple’s A-series of ARM processors. When you control the OS and the hardware it runs on like Apple is, you can make optimizations that would be impractical for a general purpose CPU to implement without complaints of playing favorites from competing OS platforms.

Finally, we may see the sunsetting of the Hackintosh. Unless a market in taking recycled iPads and iPhones apart for their A-chips, a 3rd party probably won’t have much success with creating a Macintosh clone using off-the-shelf parts.
 
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While I would have thought that going with AMD over Intel would have bought Apple a few more years in the x86 Instruction Set, Apple felt that this change was coming eventually, so embrace it and accept the future that is entirely in their hands.
We'll see if they know as much about producing computers as they think they do. The fact that it took them so many iterations if iOS to arrive at pretty good task switching doesn't fill me with confidence.
Obviously, Apple has been working towards this for the past few years.
Apple has been grumbling for years but I'm not sure how much was "we can do better" and how much was posturing to try to get better deals.
Finally, we may see the sunsetting of the Hackintosh.
RISC chips are pretty easy to emulate and some of the conventional Pee Cee chips (CPUs, GPUs and others) are insanely powerful. I think if Apple is to be successful, it is going to have to come from a whole load of different processors (perhaps on the same slab) rather than the way they started with the Mac (most of the heavy lifting handled by a CISC CPU).

And all of this has to come together in a package that meets Apple's specifications for electrical efficiency and their sense of casework fashion.
 
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