Google readies its own chip for future Pixels, Chromebooks

Do you have anything else you can link in regards to the work they’re doing in building out their own chips? Would love to read more about this.

Not for long. Verizon is shutting down their CDMA network at the end of the month.

But yeah, Exynos is garbage.

The G3 and G4 chips were much faster in their time than comparable Pentiums, as well.

The M1 chip is faster, currently, but it's not invincible.

Qualcomm has been price gouging while limiting features from each new release (for example, the new 888 doesn't have AV1 decode support... WTF!)

This is google forcing them to up their game if they want to keep playing.

Will google keep doing this? Probably not (IMO). Rather, it's likely just a demonstration of "Hey, we don't need you, so straighten up!"

That being said, if Qualcomm ignores them (since Pixel isn't a major player in the phone market) google may keep producing their own chips.

Another interesting aspect here is that Google may decide that they don't want to keep paying for the ARM licenses. This is an avenue for them to start getting RISC-V as a first class Android citizen.

I don't know about that. The processor is the main thing they have vertically integrated, right? And if I go look at a flagship like a Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G I see a BOM of $57 for the processor. (It does have a hideously expensive modem for 5G but it didn't need to have that.)

Back in the Intel days you were paying twice as much for a Macbook laptop that used the same CPU as whatever Windows laptop with similar specs.

Apple is a fabless designer, other vendors have access to TSMC as well, as long as they have space capacity. Realistically, other ARM vendors are about 2 years behind. A Snapdragon 875 scores the same as an Apple A12 on Single Thread Geekbench.

On GPU and TPU, Apple isn't that far ahead at all. TPUs are relatively simple devices, and the Snapdragon 888 already has almost double the A14 performance in TOPS on paper. GPU wise, the A14 (PowerVR derived) GPU is roughly equivalent to a 2016 era NVidia 1060. AMD's RDNA2 based cores for SOCs are likely more powerful and more capable (e.g. raytracing acceleration)

Much is made of how far Qualcomm is behind Apple, but like with AMD and Intel, Qualcomm has a wider market focus to address. Apple sells only a few SKUs, Qualcomm needs to make chips for a much wider array of demands, and so they're a jack of all trades, master of none. In much the same way, AMD and Intel have desktops and enterprise vendors to satisfy, including people running SMP systems. Does the M1 support multiple M1 SMP? Does it support ECC? The other vendors are kind of hamstrung by trying to make one architecture that pleases too many markets at once.

Look at the Anandtech Snapdragon 888 article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888...

"Qualcomm’s 25% generational boost is also less than Arm’s advertised 30% as the new S888 continues to use a 4MB L3 cache for the CPU cluster, versus Arm’s envisioned 8MB configuration for a high-end 5nm SoC with the new X1 cores. Qualcomm explained to us that this was simply a balance between cost, implementation effort, and diminishing returns of a higher cache configuration design."

Basically, Qualcomm needs to worry about what their customers are willing to pay for the chip and how much work it takes to integrate. Apple doesn't, if need be, they can bump the price for a more expensive SOC, Qualcomm Android vendors can't.

25% CPU performance uplift and 30% GPU performance uplift for the 888. the A14 gets 1583 Single Thread in Geekbench, the 888 will likely turn in a final Single Core perf between 1300-1450, only 9% less than the A14. The situation is the same for multi-core, roughly on par, and on Antutu, the Snapdragon 875 beats the A14 substantially, and wins on several 3dMark tests.

Apple does not have an insurmountable lead over the other vendors in terms of SOC, I'd argue that their primary advantage right now is their software has always been better. In particular, WebKit's JIT for ARM does a lot better than V8 for ARM, and Android Dalvik does not produce code that runs as well as LLVM on Swift (plus there's generational GC vs ARC+refcounting).

Otherwise, a 9% CPU advantage in single thread performance is nothing to write home about.

Maybe they meant both independently. As an example:

- A friend of mine just upgraded out of his iPhone 6. Until recently performance and storage seemingly just weren't that important to them.

- Another friend of mine will just buy iPhones, no matter the cost.

Both of these friends stick with Apple because they like and care about other things about the ecosystem more so than performance or cost (independently), whereas OP was perhaps implying that Android users tend to care more about "performance to cost ratio" since they could as well just buy a different phone from another maker and get the same Android experience. This of course, in the context sticking with one phone maker or another.

In the US iPhones are entrenched because of network effects (iMessage or whatever it's called) plus the Apple ecosystem. In the rest of the world where this is less the case, iPhones are a status symbol. Not even expensive Android phones have the halo iPhones have, especially in poorer countries.

Yes, people will enjoy the extra performance or extended software support, but that's not why they will buy them. I doubt 99% of regular users even know about those aspects.