> are supposed to go after Apple in this area,
Talent can be poached [1] and Technology can be acquired [2]
[1] "Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips" https://hothardware.com/news/intel-poaches-head-apple-silico...
[2] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/qualcomm-comp...
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The real problem - Apple is slowing down [3][4]
[3] "Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In"
https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...
[4] "Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase And A15 Based IP"
https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...
details from [3]
"It appears Apple has not changed the CPU much this generation. SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B. Apple’s Chief CPU Architect, Gerard Williams, as well as over a 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, SemiAnalysis broke the news about Rivos Inc, a new high performance RISC V startup which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse seems to be happening now.
We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing. Instead of a new CPU core, they are using a modified version of last year’s core. One of these modifications is related to the CPU core’s MMU. This work was being done for the upcoming colloquially named “M1X” generation of Mac chips. Part of the reason for this change is related to larger memory sizes and virtualization features/support. In addition, there may be other small changes as well, but we need hardware in the hand to analyze that. We also aren’t sure if Avalanche and Blizzard are the next generation cores or the current modified Firestorm and Icestorm cores.
Regardless of the paltry CPU gains and potential core architecture delays, Apple is still the leader in performance per watt. With Intel design teams starting to get back on track, AMD executing almost flawlessly, and Qualcomm coming in soon like a hammer with Nuvia cores, we aren’t sure if this lead will be sustained. The A11 to A12 generation was seen as Apple starting to asymptote out on gains with only a 15% gain, and the A13 to A14 looked even more weak with 8.3% gains, but now with no CPU gains, let’s cross our fingers and hope the A16 brings a large architectural change." source: [3]