Maybe. But have ever your thought that you don’t understand the power play of Apple versus its competitors. Apple year after year beats Qualcomm mobile processors with their A chips on iPhones. They make sure they retain that lead by a big margin. With their M series for computers they planned and also played it out well to ensure that users knew how fast these new chips were esp for Apple apps.
Apple’s goal was never to “beat” Qualcomm, though. If it was, they would have slowed down progress a long time ago!
Their goal with the A series was always to improve on their prior design. The fact that they soundly beat Qualcomm says more about Qualcomm and the market needs of their Qualcomm’s customers than it does Apple. Qualcomm was fortunate that there wasn’t an “AMD of ARM” nipping at their heels and that they would never have to worry about Apple selling those A series chips to other companies!
If you think Apple doesn’t care about beating their competitors in raw performance, you couldn’t be more wrong in your assessment of Apple.
Just like with the A series, Apple’s goals with the M series will ALWAYS be to improve on their prior design. Like the A series, sometimes that’ll mean a big jump, sometimes a smaller jump, but always better performance for the device that given solution is built on. I’ll put a note here with a reminder to check back with the M2 higher level processors have been released and my prediction is that Intel and maybe both Intel
AND AMD will have x86 solutions on the market that outpace the M2 in several benchmarks. We may even see a chart from Apple as we have previously where they indicate that better
peak raw performance can be found elsewhere, but not at Apple’s levels of efficiency.
Apple has the fastest phone processor, fastest tablet processor and the fastest Smartwatch processor, they are not going to let Intel steal that thunder considering the very reason of dumping Intel was that it couldn’t keep up with AMD.
Again, Apple is fastest in those areas mainly because Qualcomm hasn’t had anyone vying for their market, so their marketshare was safe. They didn’t have to expend vast sums and take risks because any company that wanted the fastest ARM processor for their Android designs were all going to be using Qualcomm designs! They didn’t even iterate on their watch chip for a few
years, causing Android Wear to wither on the vine for a bit
And, Intel has shown a serious inability to produce anything performant and efficient, so Qualcomm wasn’t even worried about them.
I’m not saying that Apple Silicon isn’t impressive, it is. But, when referring to PEAK performance, those monstrous desktop Intel PC’s with dedicated cooling hardware will always be faster than anything that Apple puts out. Heck, in some cases, what Intel sells can be overclocked by users such that, even if what Intel is selling isn’t faster (unlikely, but what if…), a user looking for raw peak performance can put in the work to overclock the system and obtain even higher performance. That’s a level of flexibility that won’t be found in any Apple Silicon design. Which is why I still say that, if highest peak performance is the primary goal and the user has no need for macOS, users will always find that performance in a Non-Apple Silicon system. Well, I mean, unless Intel has another Skylake run
