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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the benchmarks - the A7 SoC is a pretty darn great achievement for Apple! And more than that it is a serious threat to Intel given it is within striking distance of 22nm Bay Trail at 28nm and two less cores!

If they continue this - the next gen MacBook Airs will be running the A8 or even A7x with full day battery life. Intel better have something disruptive up their sleeves!

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Current MacBook Airs already get full-day battery life. Apple/ARM and Intel are quickly converging from two sides – but the cost of switching architectures (while something Apple certainly has been quite good at in the past) seems too high to me for the payoff, and that’s even if, spec for spec, ARM could beat out Intel. Add to that that the relationship of Apple with Intel seems to be a quite good one (so there is no reason for petty politics) and I really don’t see it happening.

24 hour battery life (instead of 12) and half the performance in a MacBook Air seems hardly worth it to me. To my mind that device is already more constrained by performance than battery life.

(Conversely I also don’t see ARM/Apple getting too slow to keep pace with Intel on the mobile side, so I don’t see them switching there to Intel, either.)

Apple owns a stake in ARM and likely has more influence on their direction than they would with Intel. Apple is fond of controlling their destiny and that means controlling the entire stack. They might keep iOS and OSX separate but I could definitely see them unifying hardware across all their lines as much as possible. They avoid the margin paid to Intel and can lower costs via scale.

e: I know they had a stake in ARM at one point, but I'm unsure if they still do.

As Dan said, it's not as if Intel is standing still. I definitely don't expect any Macs to be running ARM for at least a few years. Would definitely be interesting though :)

For those that haven't read the full review, here's a quote from Anand that addresses this topic:

As far as Macs go though, there's still a big gap between the A7 and where Intel is at with Haswell. The deficiency that Intel had in the ultra mobile space simply doesn't translate to its position with the big Core chips. I don't see Apple bridging that gap anytime soon.

8 days ago Intel demoed Broadwell, its 14nm Haswell shrink that cuts power usage another 30%.

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