[watersb]

Apple's core "Silicon" team was the Centaur Technologies chip design group. At the time, they had brought to market a PowerPC CPU chip that was a breakthrough in performance per watt -- for 32-bit PowerPC. Which had already lost to Intel for mainstream applications.

At Apple, Centaur joined engineers who had helped to develop early ARM RISC processors.

While I know that the talent pool migrates, engineers have moved on, Apple has retained deep institutional knowledge of how to build systems that work really well. And developed teams worldwide to deliver manufacturing at scale.

By no means are they the only company to do so. Vast resources in competition. But please understand that Apple isn't new to full-stack hardware design.

[huxley]

I believe you’re thinking of PA Semi not Centaur (which designed x86 chips not PowerPC or ARM)

[watersb]

Oops. Thanks for the correction! It was PA Semi, indeed.