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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

It seems like only Apple has made a performant ARM core so far, though. Will they license the technology? It doesn't fit their historical business model. Or do you think someone else is going to make ARM fast?

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There's really nothing to stop another ARM licensee making more powerful ARM processors, there's no special Apple pixie dust, it's just a matter of investment. The other licensees just got lazy and psychologically trapped by their price models into thinking in terms of deterministic, incremental annual performance and feature improvements. They 'knew' nobody else would break that cycle because the margins weren't big enough to support the investment needed to jump so far ahead. If the margins and volume in fast efficient ARM laptops are there, then there's nothing stopping them from happening.

One of the huge differences is Apple hasn't gone down the root of making octo-core ARM CPUs. They stuck to dual-core designs all the way until (and including) the iPhone 6S, then the iPhone 7 going quad-core, and the iPhone 8 going hexa-core. They've very clearly avoided following the big.LITTLE that most ARM licensees have followed.

The last two generations of Apple chips are big.LITTLE.

It’s already happened. Just wait till Fujitsu has their post-K chip out.

> There's really nothing to stop another ARM licensee making more powerful ARM processors, there's no special Apple pixie dust, it's just a matter of investment.

Apple CPUs are designed in-house, not by ARMH. It's not magic pixie dust, but designing a CPU core architecture from scratch is a non-trivial investment of which very few companies are capable.

Really? Only Apple?? What about Qualcomm or Cavium? Arm cores are now in the premier systems offered by Cray and HPE. See here for comparison to Skylake for Crays system: https://twitter.com/simonmcs/status/930425114922958848 Here for HPE’s: https://twitter.com/hpc_guru/status/930194415787888642 there’s also the Centriq from Qualcomm, I think there were some numbers posted at the goingarm HPC users group. Bottom line, there are plenty of super fast Arm processors that match or beat the best Intel can put out.

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