“Apple is a phenomenal company. Its market capital nearly doubles its next closest rival, Google, and it profits are the third greatest of any company in the world, according to Forbes,” Matt Smith reports for Digital trends. “Its so-called ‘war chest’ – the money it has in liquid assets – is now over $200 billion. Even the largest banks and petroleum companies struggle to keep up.”
“That’s enabled the company’s famous reliance on proprietary technology,” Smith reports. “While other companies outsource, Apple keeps it in-house whenever possible. Recently, that’s expanded to include the chips found in iOS devices. While Samsung, Microsoft, and HTC rely on Qualcomm and Intel, Apple hired its own team of engineers to work on proprietary designs exclusive to the iPhone and iPad.”
“With each new release Apple’s AX chip line has become more threatening. Cupertino’s engineers have already put other ARM chip architects on notice, and they’re nipping at the heels of Intel’s finest,” Smith reports. “A few minutes alone with an iPhone 6S, or even the iPad Air 2, can tell you there’s something to Apple’s rapidly rising scores. The company’s mobile devices are blisteringly quick. They rarely hesitate, handle multiple apps with ease, and play games at least as well as a PC with Intel’s integrated graphics. And they do all of that within a power envelope that puts the most miserly Core M to shame.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is a chipmaker; already the best mobile chipmaker in the world.
“the best mobile chipmaker in the world”.
Look out guys, it can run Crysis!
That’s like winning the AAA baseball championship.
I’d be willing to bet that you don’t know what winning at anything feels like.
So this is what it’s about…winning! And tell me, what is it YOU have won? The satisfaction of backing a winner?
Welcome to 2005!
Do you have anything intelligible to say? Or is eventually escaping from the school playground your main aim in life.
Except in your off-kilter analogy, more people are watching AAA ball than Major League. I’ll take it!
And people should watch AAA baseball, but I don’t see it here. We got the majors.
And a strictly minor league commenter in you, applecynic. I suggest that you ease yourself back down to a remedial technology forum and leave the real technology discussions to the pros.
Honestly, I don’t know what you hope to achieve on this forum.
ARM is about performance per Watt. Bragging about ARM overall performance, when in fact it bring us back 10 years, deserves to be called out.
From what I read so far, the fastest ARM (allegedly, haven’t seen them yet) is at parity or slightly faster than the slowest x86s is “meh”. I don’t like those either, though if we really want to see a difference, build identical PCs, one with ARM one with x86, with a common OS, and then benchmark them.
It’s about where each is headed that is important over where they are at this point in time. The Arm design was aimed at the the embedded and mobile market and Intel has totally failed to match it. It is incredibly impressive that despite that original specification and intent, present designs, and in particular Apples are now out performing low end desktop and laptop chips from Intel and at the rate they are developing will rapidly and increasingly out perform higher end Intel designs which are struggling to progress in in performance terms at the same rate. You can deny that, or dismiss it if you wish for that is the common attitude of those with little to no vision or with an innate prejudice but living in denial won’t change the fact that unless Intel can pull one thing out of the bag that it patently has failed to do because of the limitations of its chip’s foundations it will have increasing competition from ARM based designs. Whether that performance parity/superiority will allow Arm to infiltrate Intel’s computer client heartland is a little more problematic, even in Apples mainline computers for at least the foreseeable future. But to deny the reality in performance terms would be delusional when you study the available evidence.
I agree with all your comments about ARM ‘in their class’. But to somehow propagate that they are performance monsters, without emphasizing ‘in their class’ is folly. I don’t see an ARM based Mac Pro for the next decade. Even then, Intel will probably still be ahead by a lot, because they won’t stand still.
That was a fun read. Thanks for posting that.
They have done some insanely great work!
Agreed. A very meaty and well written article. If I owned Intel stock, i’d sell it–now!
I also do not doubt that we could one day see PowerVR GPUs in Macs.
Apple gets no credit at all for its A-series silicon. If they did, Wall Street wouldn’t keep saying consumers will eventually dump their iPhones for $200 Android smartphones because there’s no difference at all. I’m sure Apple could turn those processors into many other uses such as processors for mobile notebooks or compact servers. I just think that lots of things Apple does is completely overlooked in terms of company value.
I can’t wait to see some Apple A-series mobile laptop put an end to all the chatter about the Surface Pro 4 putting Apple’s laptops and tablets to shame. The Surface Pro 4 isn’t all that cheap and that’s what Windows people are used to buying. Low-cost hardware has always been Windows strongpoint.
If the A-series chips were found in 3rd party products I thinkkkkk Wall Street would pay more attention. As it is, all the products with the chips are Apple’s running the same OS.
Whaaa? Analysts of tech stocks …have no clue about the underlying technologies ? Tell me ain’t so, Joe. Tell me ain’t so.
Author needs to check a few financial sites. According to Bloomberg today, market cap for AAPL is about 672B vs GOOG about 502B. Nowhere close to ‘nearly double’..