Apple’s processor cadence: A pending stutter-step for improved long-term edge inference?

Apple Silicon’s success track record is indisputably impressive. It’s also rife with implementation inconsistency, albeit reflective in no small part of broader industry status impermanence.

By Brian Dipert, EDN

When Apple announced its computing platform migration from Intel x86 to homegrown Arm-based SoCs beginning in mid-2020, initial industry response was initially mixed. There was no shortage of schadenfreude, mind you, both considering that Intel had done the same thing to the IBM/Motorola PowerPC Alliance a decade and a half earlier, and more broadly Intel’s then-status as the predominant processor supplier to the computing segment. That said, and as was hopefully evident even in my earliest Apple Silicon era coverage, I was personally confident in the strategy’s sooner-or-later transition success, which is ironically winding up as we speak.

For one thing, Apple’s relationship with Intel was growing increasingly strained, as the chip supplier’s power consumption vs performance trends grew more worrisome, as new-product schedules slipped, and as the bugs in those products multiplied. For another, Apple and foundry partner TSMC (superseding initial partner Samsung) had for a while already been developing new SoCs for smartphones, tablets, smart watches and other devices. And then there’s Apple’s in-house vertical integration and control of both hardware and software, the latter spanning both operating systems and first-party applications and suites, as well as its exclusivity as provider of both developer tools and App Store approvals for third-party coders.

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