[whynotminot]

I wasn't disputing your data point. Indeed, Apple's own provided comparisons indicated that we were going to see smaller IPC gains for the A15 Big core.

I was calling out your analysis. You took the lower than usual IPC gains, and some departures for Nuvia, and surmised that Apple's engineering team must be on the decline and bleeding irreplaceable talent.

It wasn't a terribly unreasonable take given the information at the time before the A15 was even released to the public, but it was pre-mature and a bit hot. Hell that headline was blazing!

When the iPhone 13 actually released, we saw there was much more to the A15 than just pushing pure IPC--the focus for the design was clearly efficiency, and they frankly nailed it. It certainly does not look like the work of an in-decline, listless engineering team.

[dylan522p]

My original article you are talking about explicitly stated heterogenous compute is the future. It talks about transistor budgets going to LLC, GPU, media, and ISP. Much of the CPU efficiency gain comes from that doubled LLC size.