APPLE SILICON
Who’s Winning The CPU Wars?
Everyone. Everywhere. All at once.
In the fall of 2016, I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Skylake processor. Little did I know it would be my last Mac laptop with an Intel CPU, an outcome largely dictated by Intel’s failure to maintain its tick-tock (die shrink/microarchitecture) production model.
Intel’s production woes had already started with Skylake’s predecessor, the 14nm Broadwell tick (die shrink) that followed 22nm Haswell’s tock (microarchitecture). Here’s an excerpt from a 2013 ArsTechnica article with the kicker “BROADWELL UNWELL”:
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Brian Krzanich announced that production of Intel’s next-generation Broadwell CPUs would be delayed slightly due to manufacturing issues. CNET reports that a “defect density issue” in the new 14nm manufacturing process was causing lower-than-expected yields and that Intel’s first round of fixes didn’t improve the yields by the expected amount. Krzanich expressed “confidence” that the issue had been fixed, that it was just a “small blip in the schedule,”…
Those “manufacturing issues” seemingly escalated with Skylake. According to former Intel engineer François Piednoël, Skylake’s poor quality assurance left Apple having to file numerous…
