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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

> I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android.

Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through 3GS ran on Samsung SoCs. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple used their own SoCs. Not sure how Samsung could be following suit in that case.

Edit: also, Apple was never going to wait around for Intel. Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM, back in the early ninties, had used ARM.in the whole iPod line (as well as the ill fated Newton), and iPhones lined up with ARMs in mobile TDPs starting to have full MMUs.

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At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their closest competitor).

There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never provided it.

I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel.

Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Everyone was waiting for Intel, either to switch ot to know how to respond to compete.

Inthink if Intel came out with a compelling product, Apple would have switched. I suspect they invested in ARM because it made sense at the iPod level, but once you start converging mobile and desktop experiences, there are major benefits to having the same architecture for both. Just look at how rampant the ARM MacBook rumors have been for the last few years.

I think the ARM investment by Apple was good regardless of whether they wanted to switch to Intel for higher end mobile, so I don't see it as evidence as to why they didn't want to.

They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Nobody was waiting for Intel to get into the cellphone market. The TDP of Intel chips just never made sense, and it was clear that this was because they just didn't institutionally care about that market segment in a real way.

Maybe pundits were waiting, but nobody serious.

Edit: and all these ARM desktop rumors are just that, rumors. They have the ability to ship a competive low to mid end laptop on their own arm chips today, and aren't. Their wide OoO designs would run beautifully in a formfactor that isn't thermally throttled so much. IMO they don't want to switch ISAs and are waiting out the x86_64 patents.

TDP of Intel chips like the PXA270, amirite

"They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

...I'm not sure it was before the Pentium though, because it appears they both came out in 1993.

Intel didn't care. They dabbled into it with XScale, at a time the best mobile ARM processors, then gave up and sold the whole thing. Shortsighted, should've kept at it.

> Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM

This is such an understatement. From Wikipedia: The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.

Apple is a cofounder of ARM.

I guess not everyone read books about Steve Jobs.

It was Steve's idea that Intel had the best chip and Fab, and he wanted the best in iPhone. He was willing to wait for Intel to give him what he demands, the price he asked for was way lower than Intel's usual margin but very high for Apple's BOM Cost.

Ultimately one of this Top Engineers put his name badge on the table and said if Steve insist on Intel he will quit. Steve Jobs ultimately backed off. They than bought P.A. Semi and the rest is history.

Intel's failure to capture the iPhone SoC opportunity was described by Paul Otellini, Intel CEO at the time as the biggest missed opportunity / failure of his life. ( And I am still quite pissed they forced out Pat Gelsinger )

If Steve had persisted he would have repeated the same Apple Lisa mistake. And the world might not be quite the same.

*Makes me rather sentimental while typing this. I miss Steve Jobs.

Samsung has Exynos however, due to Qualcomm and patents you don't ever see their phones equipped with it here in America.

I mean, now you don't. But earlier cellphones hadn't integrated the baseband yet so it was a moot point either way.

Still not seeing how Samsung followed Apple in SoC design when Apple started by using Samsung SoCs.

Apple followed Samsung in SoC design, but Samsung (in 2016) followed Apple (2011) in core design. I expect that’s what they’re getting at.

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