[eng2prog]

Today all of this is exciting, but I have a bad feeling this is going to slide Apple towards a low performance future.

They Apple'd themselves and locked themselves in.

In 2 years, secrets aside, Apple would need to beat all 3 big dogs to be the top. How long can they sustain that?

[jitl]

Apple has been beating “the big dogs” in performance for years with this processor and OS architecture in mobile & tablet segments. They’re switching laptop and desktop segments to this architecture because the mobile architecture already overtook the big dogs and has been growing the lead for a couple of generations. The A14 phone chip is already faster than most laptop CPUs, just like the A12 phone CPU was faster than most laptop CPUs when it was released.

[mrkstu]

They've been sustaining it for many years already, that's how they've gotten to the point of being able to passing up the incumbents. They didn't just start on this path this year, its the culmination of a long play strategy.

[zepto]

How do you reach this conclusion? Their individual cores and memory architecture still beat almost everyone else on general purpose loads without any of the specialized engines.

[rado]

Today they overdelivered, why is it then so hard to believe they'll meet the expectations of a scaled up SoC? It's guaranteed.

[vb6sp6]

Couldn't they could just switch back then?

[eng2prog]

They could at significant expense.

But why would they? The users don't buy for performance.

[vb6sp6]

Basically every laptop from here on out is going to be benchmarked against these devices.

And battery life seems to be the sleeper performance metric here. Every review is going to be "you could get 6+ more hours if you just bought the macbook"

[vmchale]

IIRC iPhone did well on SMT solver benchmarks as well.