Never said it was a disaster. It’s just Apple doesn’t seem to see that it’s ALREADY hitting limits.
Even PowerPC had more exponential potential from when they entered at the 601 and when they exited at the G5.
They started with Intel with the Core architecture and by the time AS came around the Intels were exponentially faster than the original.
But compare single core performance of the M1 to the M5. Most of the gains are in multicore because there are more cores, and gpus, which could have been accomplished with better off chip solutions from others.
Power per watt is fine, but if you actually want power per dollar and have lots of dollars, the M series falls apart.
Well, they stopped chasing the “very” high-end, that’s true. At their upper-end they making high-end consumer laptops and decent (but extremely high end) workstations, but they’ve given up on enterprise level equipment across the board.
But realistically, their biggest selling product by a long shot is a smartphone - consumer level is what they do now, it’s just that these days consumer-level technology is very powerful, and far more powerful then their previous enterprise level technology. Mid-range to high-range consumer tech has made Apple rich, so you can’t blame them for focusing on that rather than “proper” high-end enterprise tech.
I think nvidia is in a much more precarious position, focusing over 9O% of their production on extremely high-end chips and related equipment to serve a single purpose, an industry and technology that doesn’t actually make any profit, but is covering running costs through investment rounds, again and again.
As for AS reaching its limit, maybe, but it’s already been more long-lived than PPC in terms of hav8 h yet to peak. Even if the performance does peak in the next year to three years, that’s still respectable enough compared to the previous chip architectures they’ve used.
I think that’s part of the cycle, and this is the fourth iteration of that cycle. Either they’d manage the transition to a new cycle well, or they won’t. But they’re in a better position than in previous cycles, as now they are rich enough and big enough to just buy a new chip technology outright when performance improvements with AS starts hitting the wall.
That AS will, at some point, inevitably hit its limit, doesn’t mean catastrophe. It just means changing up again.
