[827a]

Yup; or potentially just purchasing a fab from them, given that Intel has signaled they want to leverage TSMC more, and much of Intel's remaining value is wrapped up in server-grade chips that Apple wouldn't be interested in.

But also; Apple is one of the very few companies at their size that seems to have the political environment to make, and more importantly succeed, at decade investments. The iPhone wasn't an obvious success for 5 or 6 years. They started designing their own iPhone chips ~the iPhone 4 iirc, and pundits remarked: this isn't a good idea; today, the M5 in the iPad Pro outperforms every chip made by EVERYONE else in the world, by 25%, at a tenth the power draw and no active cooling (e.g. 9950X3D). Apple Maps (enough said). We're seeing similar investments today, things we could call "failures" that in 10 years we'll think were obviously going to be successful (cough vision pro).

[paulmist]

> Apple is one of the very few companies at their size that seems to have the political environment to make, and more importantly succeed, at decade investments.

Definitely! But I'd recon they would want to bootstrap that part of their supply chain as soon as possible? Say China does invade Taiwan, suddenly their main supplier is gone and the Intel capacity mostly goes to military and other high margin segments. If they instead own Intel they not only control the narrative but also capitalize on the increase in Intel's value.

[bigyabai]

> the M5 in the iPad Pro outperforms every chip made by EVERYONE else in the world

No, it does not. The core inside the M5 is faster than every other core design in single-threaded burst performance. That is common for small machines with a low core count and no hyperthreading.

The chip itself does not outperform every other chip in the world, nor is it 10x more efficient than the 9950X3D. That's not even napkin math at that point, you're making up numbers with no relation to relevant magnitude.

[827a]

The 9950X3D has a TDP of 170 watts. M5 has an estimated TDP of around 20 watts.

The comparison point was for single core performance, which certainly makes the TDP comparison unfair if interpreted together. The numbers are ballpark-correct.

No one else is remotely close to Apple. Apple could stop developing chips for four years, and it’s very likely they would still ship the most efficient core architecture, and sit in the top five in performance. If you’re quibbling over the semantics of this particular comparison, you are not mentally ready for what M5 Ultra is going to do to these comparisons in a few months.

[bigyabai]

> The numbers are ballpark-correct.

The numbers do not exist in isolation. They are "interpreted together" because statistics are more than just advertisement lines. The TDP comparison is mind-bogglingly stupid and you should really feel ashamed for defending it if you care about statistical integrity.

> you are not mentally ready for what M5 Ultra is going to do to these comparisons in a few months

I hope so. The past Ultra chips have been losing to Nvidia laptops in raster and compute efficiency.

[user34283]

Is Snapdragon with the X2 Elite so far behind?

I doubt it, particularly not four years.

[827a]

Can you buy and independently test a Snapdragon X2 Elite? You can go buy M5 today.