The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel

["David Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel
Date: September 17, 2016 at 9:34:28 AM EDT
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com

The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel
It is Apple, not AMD, that threatens Intel’s hegemony
By Vlad Savov
Sep 16 2016
<http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusion-processor-apple-intel-future>

In a game of chess, there are occasions when you’ll have almost your entire army of pieces still on the board, but 
positioned in such a way that their systematic downfall is all but assured. As The Matrix’s Agent Smith put it to an 
overweening police lieutenant, "your men are already dead." We may be experiencing such a moment in the tech industry 
today, thanks to Apple’s exceptional new A10 Fusion chip, which threatens to devour a big chunk of Intel’s heretofore 
imperious silicon army.

Now, before you accuse me of being high on my own metaphorical supply, I’m not saying that Intel will be crippled or 
surpassed anytime soon. But I am arguing that the chip giant is under a substantial threat, the likes of which it 
hasn’t faced for a long time, maybe ever. A quick look at the Geekbench scores attained by the iPhone 7 quantifies a 
staggering achievement: the single-core performance of Apple’s latest generation of smartphone processors has basically 
caught up with Intel’s laptops CPUs. The A10 chip inside the iPhone 7 comfortably outpaces its predecessors and Android 
rivals, and even outdoes a wide catalog of relatively recent Mac computers (including the not-so-recent Mac Pro). The 
iPhone’s notoriously hard to benchmark against anything else and this is just one metric, but it’s illustrative of 
Apple’s accelerating momentum and mobile focus.

Intel has for many years been the undisputed champion of desktop and laptop processors running the x86 instruction set. 
Its sole competitor, AMD, hasn’t actually been competitive since around the turn of the century, and we have the Wintel 
portmanteau reminding us of the enduring dominance of Intel’s chips and Microsoft’s Windows OS in the years since. But 
many things have changed since the days of comparing AMD’s Thunderbird against Intel’s Pentium.

The first thing — the one we’re all aware of, but never really adequately conscious of — is that the whole world is 
moving to mobile computing. This isn’t some slow transition off on the distant horizon like AI, it’s a thing happening 
right now. Advertisers are shifting their spending from desktop to mobile faster than they are pulling it out of print 
media, and people are buying smartphones at five times the rate that they’re acquiring new PCs. IDC’s 2015 figures show 
1.43 billion smartphones shipped versus 276 million PCs. Apple by itself shipped more iPhones (74.8 million) in the 
last quarter of last year than the entire PC industry (71.9 million) managed to ship PCs.

The predominant form of computing is already mobile

It’s already the case, by sheer force of numbers, that Apple’s A series of mobile processors are at least as important 
and market-leading as Intel’s vast portfolio of x86 chips. But the present pseudo-equilibrium between them is being 
drastically upset by Apple’s leap in performance with the new A10 Fusion. By straying into the performance waters 
previously reserved for Intel’s laptop CPUs, Apple is teasing us with the question of why not inject the A10 (or its 
successors) into actual laptops? Why shouldn’t the next MacBook run on the same chip as the current iPhone? Granted, 
the MacBook’s macOS is based on x86 whereas the A chips all use the ARM architecture, but then an equally interesting 
question might be whether Apple shouldn’t just bite the bullet and make iOS its universal operating system.

[snip]

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