It is true that Intel has a larger group of chip designers than Apple. But they both hire from the same pool (especially in Silicon Valley, but elsewhere as well), Apple has acquired several small companies that hire from that pool, and many in that pool don't like Intel's management style. Intel also has to keep a vast portion of their best engineers focused on the products that currently produce most of Intel's revenues, which is mostly hotter chips.
When "mostly hotter" is the laptop/mainstream chips this is deeply skewed view of the world. The classic PC division makes gobs of money also. It is only the Intel division directly trying to push into phones and small handhelds (and does the cell radios ) that is having problems.
Intel's larger group primarily allows them to do multiple things at the same time. Intel has Atom , Mainstream , and Xeon-E5+ level design teams going in parallel. That is just in x86. ... there is still some Itaniumn too. Intel has a multi decade long track record of being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Intel is using latest process tech and better designer talent on the lower volt range of products now also. They were a little slow to respond to the ARM threat but the response has been fully engaged years ago. Intel has filled their tick/tock pipeline now.
Apple does not have mutiple front, mutliple pipeline implementation track record. Apple rolled out the "Motion" M7 a while back. .... did Apple do the two ARM chips in the iPhone? Nope.
"... Chipworks also took a look at the M7, which is actually an ARM Cortex-M3 part from NXP running at 180 MHz. The chip allows for low-power collection of motion data drawn from a Bosch Sensortec accelerometer, an STMicroelectronics gyroscope, and an AKM magnetometer. .. "
https://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/2...tion-coprocessor-and-more-from-the-iphone-5s/
They didn't come up with a solution to out compete NXP and they are suppose to defeat Intel on Intel's home turf???? When the Apple Watch ships it is not going to be very surprising to see another 3rd party ARM chip underneath the plastic covering Apple had slapped on top. Even if there is an Apple design team assigned to the Watch class SoC, that is just even more reason why they won't be one for a laptop sized performance design zone. The number of watches shipped is likely to roar past Mac volumes over next couple of years.
Apple has also pulled folks from OS X when iOS needs major feature push. The Mac Pro went comatose for several years. The Mac Mini went comatose for almost 2 years. The iPad mini 3 comes out and Apple has simply just changed the home button. Rosetta .... outsourced tech.
Apple has a well establish track record of applying more internal resources into a smaller set of problems than on trying to expand to cover a broad product mix. Part sharing is maximized and Apple goes OCD on minute details of a small number of products.
One key difference is that Apple now has tons of data and metrics to help them optimize chip designs for Apple's products and Apple's typical customers, which may lead them down a slightly different path than Intel's need to create chip architectures for the broader general market.
The vast majority of Apple customers are iOS customers. Restated the vast majority of Apple customers are non OS X ones. The tons of data basically points toward iOS. Apple applies that data to iOS solutions. That's fine. They are doing a good job. iOS data probably does say that 3 cores, no SMT, and relatively very limited I/O bandwidth (e.g., no USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt ) is more than plenty.
The question isn't that Apple not have tons of data. The question is whether Apple can pursue multiple paths through the data's subsets. Qualcomm , Samsung , Nvidia, and several other ARM vendors would be quite happy to if Apple pulled resources off of the iPhone/iPad application processors and went OCD on some other problem.
e.g. Apple could optimize a chip design to run faster on typical iOS apps, but slower on Android apps at the same power setting as a trade-off, whereas Intel would have to optimize for the latter as well.
Intel doesn't have to do that latter at all since Apple isn't likely to buy any Intel chips to run iOS. Intel does have to balance Android and Windows on some subset of their processor offerings. That really isn't hard for them. As outlined about they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Windows is about 9x bigger than OS X so it isn't like it is a struggle to fund either.
Intel beating back the ARM invasion into their home turf doesn't particularly matter a whole lot better how much of that is Apple, Qualcomm, or Nvidia. Intel has more x86 execution data and history than they do. At this point, OS X data is x86 data. In a contest of who has bigger pile of x86 data Intel is going to win.
OS X needs to fight off the incursion of tablets about as much as Windows does. Generally the same kinds of applications and the generally same classic user base. If the Windows counter strike goes with Intel and Apple jumps out of that bow wave ..... OS X is right back where it was in the 90s. Lower shared R&D and tons of money being bet against their underlying platform.
Even if Apple kept one foot in the Intel space ( used x86 just for MBP , iMac , and Mac Pros ) they are shooting themselves in the foot because the discounts going to get from being large Intel custom are going to slide backwards.
too.
