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Looking at the timeline (using announcement dates):

  1977      : 6502
  1984 (+ 7): 68000
  1994 (+10): PowerPC
  2005 (+11): x86
  2020 (+15): ARM

intervals between transitions creep up (I know those dates may not be the ones others would pick. I skipped the Apple 1 (1976), transition periods were sometimes long (they sold Apple 2’s up to 1993, etc))

Because of that I don’t see a next transition happen before around 2040.

If it happens my $0.02 is on riscv. That’s a big if, though. The main CPU is getting less and less relevant relative to custom accelerators, and they’re in control of their own instruction set, so they may be able to fix a few bottlenecks while (more or less) staying on ARM.

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What could Apple possibly gain by switching to RISC-V? They already design their own ARM cores anyway so licensing isn’t an issue

In that timespan RISC-V could leapfrog ARM in overall performance (including power usage and price) -- who knows? Performance improvements have been a big driver of those previous migrations.

Apple could just buy up the world's capacity of the smallest node size process and build a faster chip with lower power draw, irrespective of whether ARM or RISC-V.

Apple didn’t migrate from PowerPC to Intel because Intel CPUs were way faster, there was just not a way for keeping with the demand and get new processors into the new cash drivers of the time, i.e. laptops.

It was essentially the same with Intel and Arm, plus the fact that they could save money and further integrate vertically.

Yes they did. You had fast PowerPC chips at the time, but they couldn't compete at power efficiency, which was important for consumer hardware, especially portable devices.

I'm confused. Of course Intel chips were better for laptops, that's exactly what I said.

That’s why I said “including power usage and price” above. IBM just weren’t able and/or willing to match Intel’s chips for Apple’s purposes.

(As I recall, but maybe I misremember, Apple claimed a big performance advantage for their high-end G5 Macs but in the real world it was a bit dubious.)

That could happen for ordinary people and companies who have to rely on commodity processors or who license ARM cores and add their own peripherals around them on a custom chip, but Apple designs their own ARM processors.

They have an ARM architecture license. They design their own ARM implementations from the ground up.

If something can be done to RISC-V designs that would leapfrog ARM and ARM does not want to incorporate whatever breakthrough that is into their own cores for some reason that will mean that the people who rely on commodity ARM chips or on licensed ARM cores will be out of luck.

Apple on the other hand would be free to incorporate that into their ARM implementation.

> RISC-V could leapfrog ARM in overall performance

RISC-v is an instruction set. If any company made a better RISC-v core than Apple can make themselves they could either buy it from them or make their own faster ARM core.

That’s what happened with Intel and PowerPC…

What improvements in the instruction set itself could make RISC-v fundamentally faster than equivalent ARM chips?

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