>Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency.

Why would they spend billions to "catch up" to an ecological niche that is already occupied, when the best they could do - if the argument here is right that x86 and ARM are equivalent - is getting the same result?

They would only invest this much money and time if they had some expectation of being better, but "sharing the first place" is not good enough.

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samus 3 days ago | parent [-]

The problem is that they are slowly losing the mobile markets, while their usual markets are not growing as they used to. AMD is less vulnerable to the issues that arise from that because they are fabless, and they could pivot entirely to GPU or non-x86 markets if they really wanted to. But Intel has fabs (very expensive in terms of R&D and capex) dedicated to products for desktop and server markets that must continue to generate revenue.

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9rx 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The question remains: Why would they spend billions only to "catch up"? That means, even after the investment is made and they have a product that is just as good, there is still no compelling technical reason for the customer to buy Intel/AMD over the other alternatives that are just as good, so their only possible avenue to attract customers is to drive the price into the ground which is a losing proposition.

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BoredPositron 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The markets didn't really budge. Apple only grew 1% in the traditional PC market (desktop/notebook) over the last 5 years and that's despite a wave of new products. The snapdragons are below 1%...

	▲	samus a day ago \| parent [-]
		And that's fine for them since they have also have their mobile platform, which is arguably more important at this point.