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by Arn_Thor 677 days ago
You say Intel’s semiconductor fabbing was leading when Apple started to do their mobile processors on ARM. In wafer tech that is probably true, I don’t know. But clearly Intel wasn’t making power efficient mobile chips. Either because they didn’t have the design capability or didn’t consider the segment worth it. There’s an interesting article in that alone.

My only point is that the story of Intel’s disorganized retreat is at least as relevant as Apple’s march forward

2 comments

Intel's relationship to power efficiency is really odd. They only started doing heterogenous/big.LITTLE in 2020 despite ARM based SoCs using it for more than a decade to great advantage. It's not as if portable, battery powered devices was a surprising application to Intel, we've had laptops for decades, and so leaving such strong efficiency gains on the table for years is quite confusing.
This is, again, the difference between an article talking about chip design problems (which America certainly doesn't have) and semiconductor production problems (which America does have).