[46Bit]

> This thing ONLY EXISTS in the first place because of Apple's continual vertical integration push

This seems pretty grounded.

> The whole reason why they're able to beat Intel/AMD is because they don't have to cater to the exact same generic market that the established players do, but instead massively optimise for their exact needs.

I'm less convinced of this. Their exact needs seem to be making laptops... and so these chips would make interesting candidates for other laptops, if split off from Apple.

It's never going to happen, and an independent company might struggle for R&D money, but if these prove to be better laptop CPUs there is a market there.

[leadingthenet]

But they're not just making generic laptops. They're making Macs.

Everything from the memory model, to the secure enclave for TouchID/FaceID, to countless other custom features, are parts that other SOCs do not need to have present on the die, and cannot optimise for.

For good or bad, this is truly a piece of engineering that could only have come out of Apple.