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Is it? How much faster are CPU cores going to get? Also, Apple has many billions of dollars to throw at this.

• derefr 6y ago
  > How much faster are CPU cores going to get? Whenever we hit a Moore's Law bottleneck, we see a transition to new CPUs being increasingly optimized for power-efficiency instead. Whether or not FLOPS remain a moving target, FLOPS-per-watt will very likely continue to grow for a few more decades. > Also, Apple has many billions of dollars to throw at this. Unless they're planning on selling these chips on the open market, I don't see how "throwing billions of dollars at this" project can be justified to their shareholders, even if it's something they can technically afford to do. As it is, it's a pure cost-center optimization (i.e. removing the need to pay Intel, at the expense of now needing to make the chips themselves.) This presumably balances out slightly positive on their books, not mind-bogglingly positive like a new product line would be. "So"—the prototypal shareholder asks—"why are you putting $bns/yr worth of silicon engineers to work on this, rather than putting them to work on feature cores to create+differentiate a new product line?" In my mind, it only works out for Apple if it's actually not all that expensive for them to reach parity with Intel/AMD; i.e., if it's something they can do while still having silicon-engineering talent left over to keep doing feature engineering for new hardware. Which is what I find interesting: how did Apple reach this point, where they can leapfrog Intel/AMD without it even being a "drop everything" moonshot project for them?
  • my123 6y ago
    AMD's whole revenues are very small compared to Apple, and the Mac and iPhone will share the same big CPU core uArch.