> Apple shipped 64-bit ARM processors for the iPhone at least a year before Qualcomm could do it for Android devices. The reaction to the A7 was similar to what

> Apple shipped 64-bit ARM processors for the iPhone at least a year before Qualcomm could do it for Android devices. The reaction to the A7 was similar to what we're seeing now with the M1—not possible, there's some trickery going on, etc. That is because it is not possible to ship a top-end design for a new ISA in that amount of time. The more reasonable answer is they had been working on a new core design for some years before. AMD has hinted that their Zen design makes it relatively easy to swap the x86 frontend for an ARM frontend. Apple was considering buying MIPS around that time. I suspect they strong-armed ARM into accepting their ARMv8 proposal because it was good and because Apple buying MIPS would be disastrous for ARM's share price. At that point, it wasn't faster than possible, it was just designing the last part of the chip (or if both frontends were being worked on in tandem, cancelling one of them and focusing everyone on the other). This explains why ARM announced v8 and then took the full 4 years to ship their first low-power core (A53) and even longer to ship their bad first try at a high-performance core (A57 -- with the more baked A72 being superior in almost every way).