Apple actually makes a lot more acquisitions than you think, but they are rarely very high profile/talked about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

> One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion…

NeXT? But yes, I completely get what you’re saying, I just couldn’t resist. It was an amazingly long sighted strategic move, for sure.

Equally (arguably) importantly, Johny Srouji joined Apple the same year as PA Semi's acquisition - '08 – and led Apple A4. (He previously worked at IBM on POWER7, which is a fascinating switch in market segment.)

Intel and Nokia partnered around 2007 .. 09 to introduce x86 phone SoCs and the required software stack. Remember MeeGo? Nokia engineers were horrified by the power consumption and were convinced it wouldn't work. But Nokia management wanted to go to a dual supplier model instead of just relying on TI at all cost.

MeeGo proceeded far too slowly and Elop chose his former employers' Windows instead in 2011. Nokia's decline only increased and Intel hired many Nokia engineers.

Soon Nokia made no phone anymore and Intel did not even manage to make their first mass-selling product.

ARM-based SoCs were 10 years ahead in power saving. The ARM ecosystem did not make any fatal mistakes, Intel never caught up.

I don't think it was core architecture issues. My impression is that over the years their efforts to get into low-power devices never got the full force of their engineering prowess.

When they bought PA Semi the company worked on IBM Power architecture chips. It was very much the team Apple was after, not any one particular technology.

that was a part of it, yes.

but do not forget how focused they (amd/intel, esp in opteron days -- edit) were on the server market.

They bought Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2008 which is where all their ARM chip designs came from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

Besides Apple's SoCs they also have made dedicated silicon for secure enclaves, wifi, bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and cellular radios, and motion coprocessors.

Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.

Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.

It is likely the hardware effiency of their chips. Apple SoCs running industry-standard benchmarks still run very cool, yet still show dominant performance. The OS efficiency helps, but even under extreme stress tests like SPEC, the Apple SoCs dominate in perf & power.

See Lunar Lake on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM versus the M3 on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM: https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q?t=531

The 258V (TSMC N3B) has a worse perf / W 1T curve than the Apple M1 (TSMC N5).

I have heard that Apple Silicon chips are designed around the retain-release cycle that goes back to NeXT and is still here today (hidden by ARC compilation), but I don't think that's the whole story. Back when the M1's came out, many benchmarks showed virtualized Windows blowing the doors off of market-equivalent x86 CPUs.

Also, there's the obvious benefits of being TSMC's best customer. And when you design a chip for low power consumption, that means you've got a higher ceiling when you introduce cooling.

The SoC benefits are being ignored by some people here. Apple doesn't control every piece of software as some here posit, however, OS optimizations and utilization of extra-efficiency cores (though still requiring SoC design they do also need specific OS code support) are part of the performance.

Those PC ARM chips like Snapdragon were designed first and foremost for mobile, too.

Any downvoters care to actually leave me a reply telling me why?

Im not wrong!