[Kon-Peki]

That's an interesting idea.

The Apple M1 lineup, for example. The M1 standard, pro, max, and ultra are not differentiated by their ARM cores other than the quantity of them. It's really the GPU cores and media encoding components. And that Neural Engine thing is really important for many apps and OS features. At what point do the general purpose CPU cores on a modern chip become minor players that have very little impact on overall chip performance? I don't think we're there yet, but it certainly could happen.

EDIT - I'm saying M1 vs M1 Pro vs M1 Max vs M1 Ultra. Not M1 vs Intel i7

[yywwbbn]

That not really true though. M1 had considerable better single core performance at the time of release than anything else with a comparable TDP. And the Neural Engine is only useful is fairly narrow use cases.

[mkr-hn]

I wonder if there were similar conversations about math coprocessors when they joined the CPU. What did people say about increasing specialization of cores then? The closest recent analogue is GPUs joining the CPU on mobile devices, but it was only recently that those weren't complete garbage.

[kcb]

Apples ARM cores have been significantly ahead of off the shelf ARM designs for years now.