“In a note out late yesterday, Robert Maire of boutique research firm Semiconductor Advisors follows up on some positive observations about Apple’s ‘A8’ chip, introduced last week along with its iPhone 6 models,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s. “In an initial note published on Friday, Maire observed that Apple’s stated specification of 2 billion transistors in the A8 is more than the 1.4 billion transistors in Intel’s ‘Haswell’ desktop chip.”
“He also notes Apple’s claim of a 25% performance improvement over its A7 chip in the iPhone 5S, a claim of 50% GPU performance increase, and a claim of the A8 being ‘50% more power efficient,'” Ray reports. “Observed Maire, ‘This is more than double the normal gain of 15-20% expected from a shrink to 20nm technology that A8 is based on. This suggests that Apple made some significant design improvements on top of just the hardware shrink.'”
Ray reports, “Maire, noting that such processors could take over some ‘light’ application tasks in a notebook like the MacBook Air, wondered ‘When will Apple start building its own laptop and desktop processors?’ While he doesn’t think Intel will lose Apple’s desktop and laptop business ‘anytime soon,’ he opined, ‘It should also be viewed as a threat to Intels entry into the tablet and smartphone market. Apple has set a very high bar in performance that it seems would be very difficult for Intel to match on a price/performance basis without substantial subsidies (contra revenue…).'”
Read more in the full article here.
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