> By sticking to Intel or even x86 in general, there is ample evidence Apple is leaving a lot of performance on the table. That isn't necessarily true. Having

> By sticking to Intel or even x86 in general, there is ample evidence Apple is leaving a lot of performance on the table. That isn't necessarily true. Having competitive performance at lower power isn't always the same thing as having better performance, even assuming these benchmarks are representative. Processors designed specifically for low-power make different design trade offs. One of those is to exchange maximum clock speed for IPC (because higher clocks burn watts). The A13 maxes out at 2.65GHz, the i7 8086k hits 5GHz. Chances are you can't just give the A13 a 95W power budget and see it hit 5GHz, it would have to be redesigned and the kinds of changes necessary to get there would generally lower IPC. Apple is also riding the same advantage as AMD -- they're using TSMC's 7nm process which is better than what Intel is currently stuck with. Even AMD is still using an older process for the I/O die. We don't know what that's going to look like a year or two from now. Meanwhile the renewed competition between Intel and AMD makes this kind of a bad time to move away. They're both going to be working hard to take the performance crown from each other and Apple would have to beat both of them to claim an advantage. And continue to do so, or they'd have a lot of pissed off customers and developers after forcing a transition to a new architecture only to have it fall behind right after the transition is over.