Single threaded CPU performance improvements are pretty much tapped out at this point. Process improvements have slowed to a glacial crawl (compared to the past

Single threaded CPU performance improvements are pretty much tapped out at this point. Process improvements have slowed to a glacial crawl (compared to the past), clockspeed can't really increase much while maintaining the ability to be air cooled, and IPC is mostly mined out. Intel probably has the best processor cache in the industry, and adding more just isn't yielding much for general purpose applications (can't really speak about multi-tenant environments or other specialized applications). I'd guess, but I don't know, that Apple's performance growth is coming from two places: 1. More multi-threading. Moble chips in general have been getting more parallel over time. It's pretty easy to construct synthetic benchmarks that benefit from this; it's less easy for general purpose applications, although they are coming along. 2. The GPU is improving. It seems like there is a lot of headroom here to improve. Apple's GPU is almost certainly substantially better than Intel's. This isn't really a huge problem for Intel, because for people who care, they can always get a discrete GPU. Super powerful GPUs can be very impactful for certain applications, but they just don't have general applicability. In general, I'm pretty skeptical that Apple's CPUs are improving in the necessary areas to enable them to switch their pro lines. Moving over their Air and Macbook products to in house chips seems pretty straight forward.