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Comment by WanderPanda | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is not Qualcomm that is to blame, but it is Apple to be praised. But I guess I am talking glass half full / half empty here, so nevermind :D

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Yeah, Apple definitely deserves a lot of praise on these chips. They are not even incremental improvements but drastic ones which will probably change the landscape completely.

Like AWS was working on their own ARM chips, they now have a benchmark to go against if they even can. In DCs a lot of spend is on just power consumption. If these chips can really drive compute in servers at a much lower power consumption, it is just not monetarily good for the company but good for the planet too.

I think they are to blame. Qualcomm is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) manufacturer of ARM chips, yet they still simply use reference designs. Besides, for the next flagship (Snapdragon 888) they switched to Samsung 5nm (inferior to TSMC 5nm) and they're not even using the ARM-recommended 8MB L3 cache, but staying with 4MB.

It seems benchmarks for tha SoC aren't bad, but it really shows that they aren't really trying to catch up to Apple.

(My source is https://www.anandtech.com/show/16271/qualcomm-snapdragon-888...)

But isn't ARM to be blamed if the standard designs (which apparently almost everyone is using) are inferior?

Yes and no. The problem is those standard designs have to please a very wide spectrum of customers, so in a lot of the tradeoffs in chip design (like area vs performance) they tend to lean more towards keeping area small. The Cortex X1 is supposed to change that, though, but it's very new.

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