The iPad Pro's chip is not a big deal

To say that Apple gains nothing by licensing and developing their own ARM chips is disingenuous. They make some of the best, if not the best, ARM processors for mobile/general purpose systems. Consistently great battery life and performance packages, compared to competing ARM packages. After all, iOS is specifically tuned for A*-chips, and vice versa.

By continuing to develop their own chips based on existing ARM specs, they can take advantage of the rising tide while maintaining the freedom to make changes as they want, without waiting on the industry to deliver. I doubt that Apple has that sort of influence, if any at all, over the architectural minutiae of Intel chips. It seems more likely they just take the latest of whatever Intel dishes out, like virtually everyone else.

ARM may never fully compete with Intel processors, but if it ever does, Apple will be in a great position to own its entire processor lineup. That amount of top-to-bottom control costs money, but it gives them a greater position in the market. It doesn't sound crazy at all to me to imagine Apple continuing to blur the lines between their ARM and Intel systems, to the point at which maintaining separate architectures no longer makes sense.

"ARM and x86 are simply instruction sets (RISC and CISC, respectively). There's nothing about either set that makes one or the other more efficient."

This senior editor should go back to reporting on vaporizers and video games.

Newer Intel CPUs are even using RISC cores with wrappers for CISC functions because it is more efficient.

What impresses me most about this years upgrade is that the graphics performance of the iPad Pro is better than my 13" Macbook Pro in some benchmarks. This is why they can say "desktop class performance".

Anyway, the title is misleading; the article talks only about the CPU whereas chip implies the whole SoC. But that doesn't matter. The whole article is written rather one sided by someone who just copied what a clueless analyst told him.

I can't wait for Anandtech's full review on the A9X SoC. They already have a short preview on their site: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9780/taking-notes-with-ipad-pr...

In all fairness, in a normal office use, the CPU is very rarely max-ed out, and an ipad pro may be able to do the task as well as a laptop.

It matters more to users doing graphics and videos, which I think is also probably more the target population of the ipad pro.

How much did Intel pay engadget for this article?

It's specially not a big deal considering they shipped with iOS 9 who stutters in UI operations. Hardware is nothing without software and it seems Apple is forgetting that more and more every year in search of revenue.