You're talking about the HP's old precision architecture, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC That's an interes

You're talking about the HP's old precision architecture, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC That's an interesting comparison because it's another case where a big player created their own chips for a competitive advantage. There are surely some lessons in there for Apple silicon, but I don't there there's any particular reason to think it will follow the same path as HP PA. PA started in the '80s. It was aimed at high-end workstations and servers. My impression was that the value proposition was narrow: it was sold to customers who needed speed and had a pretty big budget. Until checking now, I was unaware, but it seems to have carved out a niche and was able to live there for a while, so it wasn't exactly a failure. Time will tell how apple silicon fares. Today the M1 is a fast, power-efficient, inexpensive chip, with a reasonable (and rapidly improving) software compatibility story, and is available in some nice form factors... so basically a towering home run. But we'll just have to see how Apple sustains it over the long run. Frankly, they can drop a few balls and still have a strong story, but it's hard to project out 5, 10, 20 years and understand where this might end up. (Personally, I'm almost surely going to get an Apple silicon Mac, as soon as they release the one for non-low-end machines. The risk looks small, the benefits look big.)