Intel had Tigerlake / WillowCove Design but they cant ship it. They also have Golden Cove. If you have put the design they were suppose to be using now, on a IPC basis Intel might still be in the lead.
Is it the work to figure out how to lay down the component blocks on the die and all the circuit routing? Is it figuring out how to assemble the power-efficient components from the Arm library? Does that take years? Is it the instruction set? Is it the planning for manufacturing capacity?
I'm just curious to know what the actual work and division of labor / time is to "make a chip".
I would love to know for example:
-- Initial design, 10 people, 1 year
-- Prototype runs, 5 people, 6 months
-- Final design, 5 people, 1 year
-- etc etc.
-- Acquiring fab capacity / manufacturing hardware, 10 people, 1 year
-- etc etc.
But sounds like there's no way Intel or others can just "leapfrog" even if they knew what needed to be done and could abandon their prior choices.
At best It take one year to build a Fab. It takes another one just to plan to built it. That is assuming you get the regulation approval with zero delay.
Building a Fab means absolutely nothing if you cant get the process to yield. Look at Samsung Foundry in the past 3- 5 years.
Intel's Leapfrog chances was their Intel Custom Foundry. Had they not mess that one up they would have a Fighting chance. Even if they had a Design that Leapfrog Apple's M1 today, it would still be let down by their 10nm SuperFin Process.
No one makes ARM chips for laptop, because of the chicken and egg issue. Windows on ARM going mainline could change it.
Once Microsoft is shipping these layers within Windows, it's only a matter of time before the use of ARM CPUs in more laptops takes off.
If you read the anandtech article describing the A14/M1 chips, it seems that the ARM ISA lets Apple do some things that are either exceptionally hard or impossible on x86, like making individual cores much “wider” in terms of instruction decode, allowing the A14/M1 cores to do significant parallel execution. This allows their cores to be significantly more efficient in terms of instructions per clock cycle. To be clear this isn’t just the benefits of ARM - Apple is far ahead of other ARM designers as well. On the other hand, the wider the execution pipeline, generally the slower the cores have to be clocked (Im actually not sure why this is, to be honest). This is part of how Intel is able to produce chips in the 5.0+ GHz range.
So it’s not that every designer converges to the same design (internally, they’re quite different). Instead, what’s happening is that all the relevant trade offs (pipeline width and depth, ISA, fab tech, power targets, etc) are leaving competitors within an order of magnitude in performance. And the question of who’s going to take the lead is a question of who’s executing best on all these fronts, and who’s currently got a lot of talent working on areas that will see continued improvement.
But whatever happens, I wouldn’t bet against Apple. Their team has been delivering improvements like clockwork, year over year for quite a long time now.