[Bud]

Not true; Apple's own A-series silicon is starting to be a serious threat. For instance, the A10 in the iPhone 7 now beats all Intel chips ever shipped in MacBook Airs in single-core CPU benchmarks. Right now, today. And it's less than 3 years behind vs. Intel CPUs in the MacBook Pro. It also beats the Mac Pro's 12-core Xeon (from 2013) in single-core.

This despite the A10 running on FAR less power.

Apple's definitely within shouting distance and is a serious threat to just replace Intel entirely, at least for its own needs.

[pier25]

Achieving the same level of performance with ARM is only half the story.

Apple has to surpass the Core i series to make any sense to switch.

And then there's the whole clusterfuck that would be porting all the x86 software to ARM. When Apple switched to Intel emulation of Power PC was usable via Rosetta but AFAIK emulation of x86 with ARM is extremely slow.

[skykooler]

I wonder whether it could be possible for Apple to build in a hardware accelerator for the x86 emulator into the chip?

...Though at that point I suppose they'd basically be building an x86 co-processor into it. No idea if that would actually help performance or not.

[Thaxll]

I have really hard time believing those benchmarks claiming a mobile processor beating a recent desktop CPU. It all came from a few tweets without real numbers. Show us a real benchmark.

[mappu]

At the same clock speed, it's on average 25% faster according to http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?p=278368#post2... . The caveat (and the rest of the thread) make for interesting reading.

[r00fus]

Everyone is waiting with baited breath for a A-series Macbook (maybe call it the iBook again, to solidify "i" as personal/consumer line as opposed to "Pro")