Olivier Barthelemy
Jul 23, 2017 · 1 min read

I’ll play naysayer a bit, though what Apple has achieved is indeed very impressive.

On Apple making their own SoCs, things aren’t as one-sided as they’re made out to be:

1- The “handily beats competition” part is only for very specifically single-thread tasks. That’s nice because iOS prioritizes the UI thread and in the past multitasking was light at best, and dingle-thread nicely skews app benchmarks since benchs usually test one app at a time. The iBubble carefully avoids multi-threaded stuff though, where the competittion’s numerous cores clearly overtake the Axx CPUs, and which helps with more realistic and forward-looking use cases: most phones do multitask these days, even individual apps (Chrome, Firefox…) run on multiple threads. Also, making your own SoC is not that extraordinary, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi do it; Samsung in particular has been doing it for decades.

2- Apple’s famous limited management bandwidth means that this SoC activity comes at the expense of other stuff, say Mac updates.