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by brucethemoose2 975 days ago
The problem with the current Qualcomm cores is that they are cheap and low power, but the new Nuvia cores should alleviate this.

...But be careful what you wish for. There have been some promising ARM core designs (Samsung's Mongoose series, Nvidia's Denver/Carmel) that all ended being worse than tweaked ARM-designed cores.

Others (Marvell's SMT ThunderX series, Fujitsu's HPC A64FX) were too niche, and ultimately discontinued.

Also, based on the M2's rather limited gains, some are suggesting that the M1 was an anomalously good design, and that Apple can't necessarily keep that massive edge.

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Didn't they also lose one of their key employees? That was arguably in 2019, before the M1 came out, so I don't know how much of an impact Gerard Williams actually had, but I do wonder if they can keep the team together.

(Edit: Just googled, Gerard Williams is now at Nuvia and in the middle of a lawsuit with Apple)

Yeah, and Nuvia (now Qualcomm) aren't the only ones who sniped them.

Apple's effort to make a good modem also reportedly failed, so its not like their chip team are miracles workers.

Not that I am skeptical. Apple has a long history of making good premium SoCs.

This has probably been the biggest issue Apple has faced post M1. They've lost lots of top people to other companies trying to design performance cores like Apple's. That and their SoC development resources are spread across far more products than they used to be.