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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Apple buying the memory business seems uninteresting. That's a commodity business with low margins. Toshiba does make ARM CPUs, and Apple might want to get into the CPU business, but that's not the business being offered for sale.

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> Apple might want to get into the CPU business

Apple is already in the CPU business?

Every iPhone and iPad sold in the last 5 years has used an Apple designed CPU core. [0]

Apple has chosen to keep the CPU exclusive to their mobile products as they obviously feel it gives them a competitive advantage. They could sell the SoC to others if they wanted to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X

Amazing, the A10 is a quad-core 2.34 GHz CPU. My Late-2016 MacBook Pro has a 2 GHz Intel Core i5.

I don't know a lot about CPUs, but isn't the A10 more powerful? Why don't they use them for their laptops, already..?

You can't compare CPUs from different architectures (ARM vs Intel) based purely on clock speed. There are a lot of other differences which mean things like the A10 generally aren't faster than similarly-clocked laptop chips.

ARM-based chips (like the A10) tend to have a much smaller thermal envelope and much less battery draw. They were built ground-up for mobile use, while x86 was built for speed & power.

I can't think of many fanless x86 laptops -- the only one that comes to mind is the current 12" Macbook, but that makes a ton of compromises and is running a CPU that's basically 5-6 years old. On the other hand, the idea of a cell phone with a big heatsink and fan assembly is laughable.

That's true.

Yes, I don't know a lot about CPUs.

It's true, a recent MBP will destroy the iPhone or iPad in a benchmark. You can't compare Apples to oranges with CPU speeds alone. However, you can run a benchmark. And on a popular one, GeekBench, the iPhone generally beats the non-Pro MacBook.

And:

"The iPhone 7 scores better on both single- and multi-core than any MacBook Air ever made, and performs comparably to a 2013 MacBook Pro."

https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/2385400

https://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/6170528

https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-geekbench-benchmark-...

where can I find an iPhone with single-core A processor that outperforms a MBP?

The benchmark runs either single core or multi core. Is not a single core iPhone.

The A10 isn't a "true" quad-core - it's a 2x2 design with 2 "heavy" (processing efficient) and 2 "light" (power efficient) cores. But, importantly, only one type can be active at a time - ie. you effectively only have 2 cores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A10 has more information.

It would make sense to get Intel since lot of development tools and businesses relied on Intel technology. We won't know until LLVM, Clang, Rust and Swift could replace C/C++ in the future.

I see.

Perhaps they could do a virtual machine type of thing like they did when they transitioned to Intel (was it called Rosetta?).

> Why don't they use them for their laptops, already..?

They will, it's just a matter of when.

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