Macintel: The End Is Nigh

  > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more
  > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it
  > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat.

In the ancient days, CPUs ran synchronously (or close to it) with main memory. Hasn't been that way for decades. CPU performance has ramped up so much more quickly than that of main memory that it's ridiculous.

And this is where most of your transistors are spent these days - finding ways to allow the CPU to do some useful work while it sits around waiting for main memory. Look at a modern i5 CPU die:

https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5

Things to note: - Tons of L1/L2/L3 cache so we can keep things in fast memory. The transistors dedicated to cache dwarf those allocated to the actual processing cores, let alone the parts of those processing cores dedicated to those crufty ol' x86 instructions - Lots of transistors dedicated to branch prediction and speculative execution so we can execute instructions before we've even waited around for the data those instructions depend upon to arrive from slow-ass main memory

Sure, mobile ARM chips are tiny and efficient! They run at 1-2GHZ while paired with fast RAM that's not that much slower than their CPUs. They don't need to devote gobs and gobs of transistors to speculative execution and branch prediction and cache.

But all that changes if you want to scale an ARM chip up to perform like a "desktop-class" Intel chip. You want to add cores and execution units? If you want to keep them fed with data and instructions you're going to need all that extra transistor-heavy baggage and guess what -- now you're just barely more efficient than Intel, and you can't match Intel's superior process technology that's been at least a transistor shrink or two ahead of the competition since the dawn of the semiconductor industry.

Eventually, yes, the ARM chip makers will solve this. RAM will get faster and processes will be enshrinkified. Just understand that transistor size and pokey RAM are the bottlenecks, not that nasty old x86 instruction set.

How far does Apple want to go? The rabbit hole is pretty much infinite. Do they want to make their own plastics and paints and metals? Do they want to mine the materials for all of the above? Do they want to make the mining machines for their mines? Etc, etc, etc.

Whether Apple would allow it is a different question.

Anecdotally I know for me, this would cause me to move from a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina to an Air or even a mini. Time and market has changed to where having a mac is a must for me as a professional developer but I won't spend 3K on a single machine whose primary differentiator is ability to compile iOS applications.