Chalking it down to ARM doesn’t cut it... other companies make ARM chips too, including Qualcomm. Most Android phones run ARM, and given they outnumber iPhones heavily you’d expect massive improvements. But this is better than putting Qualcomm’s best chip into the Mac.
Qualcomm seems to be stagnating just like Intel at the moment, it will be a few years until high performance ARM chips come to non-Apple devices, unless Microsoft can strong arm them for their Surface line
I'm guessing the high performance ARM chips for non-Apple devices will be coming from Nvidia or Samsung in the future
Yes, ARM is one piece of many. (Commented about this above)
Though I suspect if Qualcomm were able to source a TSMC 5nm chip, it would be more competitive with Apple than Intel is at this point though. Apple has a lot of other things going for it where Qualcomm lags (the Secure Enclave, graphics performance, audio and photo processing, the neural engine etc etc)
Debatable. Qualcomm operates under a strict transistor budget because their chips lack a dedicated customer willing to pay what it costs to develop an ultra-wide CPU like this. Apple knows they're going to sell 100+ million of whatever core they make so they're able to more easily amortize and justify the costs of development.
Intel gets no such benefit of the doubt. I have no idea what on earth is going on over there.
What I was trying to get at is that the ARM designs plus the TSMC fabs are a big part of Apple's success here. The pieces are out there where someone else could put together an ARM based package that's more competitive with Apple. In retrospect, maybe it's more likely to see something like this from Nvidia than Qualcomm.
Even then, it's hard to say how competitive that CPU would be. Just based on Microsoft's Surface with it's half-assed Qualcomm CPU, it seems feasible though.
