Sure they’re expensive to design and make, but with appropriate volume or margin you’ll get the lowest power device possible for your application. General SoC’s

Sure they’re expensive to design and make, but with appropriate volume or margin you’ll get the lowest power device possible for your application. General SoC’s are just that: general. Moore and Dennard stopped helping, so they’re missing what you need and have what you don’t, requiring a SW stack that ends up working around it all. Example from HPC 10-15 years ago: Opteron had a fast start but gen2 was really late. Intel Sandybridge Xeon was their first with PCIe 3.0, which was 6-9 months minimum after adapter cards supported it. Both products caused headaches for interconnect and system builders because they couldn’t ship with parts that didn’t exist. Apple can of course control their execution of their A series, but they can also be first to AirPods and a smart watch with that integrates Siri. This from a company that famously waited for a market to look like it was going to take off before getting in because they let other companies shake out the issues with merchant silicon before they’d integrate. Now they don’t have to wait.