True, it's not just a story of Apple besting Intel. AMD has been beating them too.
Rough recent history for Intel.
I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch, they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But the choice was really to switch to either themselves or AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who knows, that's alternate history speculation at this point.
The article in question is about Intel potentially getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I think a competitive market is important.
But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in an alternate reality.
I think a lot has happened in Intel land since Apple folk stopped paying attention, as well. Intel still has a lot of work to do to catch up to AMD, but they have been fairly consistently posting gains in all areas. Apple really doesn't have a power advantage other than that granted by their process node at this point, against either AMD or Intel. AMD has seemingly delayed the Strix Halo launch because it wasn't necessary to compete at the moment. And Qualcomm is taking the same path Apple has, but is willing to sell to anyone, and as a result has chips in all standalone VR headsets other than Apple's.
It remains to be seen if Apple is willing or able to scale their architecture to something workstation class (the last Intel Mac Pro supported 1.5TB of ram, it's easy to build a 4TB Epyc workstation these days).
Rough recent history for Intel.
I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch, they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But the choice was really to switch to either themselves or AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who knows, that's alternate history speculation at this point.
The article in question is about Intel potentially getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I think a competitive market is important.
But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in an alternate reality.