Yeah, as soon as the guy started saying this I discounted the whole article. Yes, maybe Apple will switch to A7 chips, but this author sure doesn't know enough about processors to have any kind of a privileged viewpoint.
If one doesn't even know what uops are, and doesn't have a mental estimate of what percentage of i7 silicon is devoted to the instruction decoder, one doesn't get to write articles comparing Intel to ARM chips.
Edit: Going back to the article I note the author is Jean-Louis Gassee, so this is just bizarre. He is kind of just talking out his ass and I would hope he'd know better than that, because whereas making stuff up is a survival skill in exec-land, being blatantly and demonstrably wrong about said make-ups is not.
Yeah, not sure why anyone is interested in what Gassee has to say. He used to be "head of Apple's advanced product development", but was forced out for failing to deliver.[1]
Also, he should get the small details right. He claims in the article
The x86 nickname used to designate Wintel chips
originates from the 8086 processor introduced
in 1978 – itself a backward-compatible extension
of the 8088…)
This is exactly backwards. The 8086 was first, ahead of the 8088. Not sure why Gassee even felt he needed to throw that detail into the article (unless he's getting paid by the word), but if he's going to say it, he should at least check Wikipedia first.[2]
Gasse is probably better known to HN folks as the head of the BeOS system, which he did after Apple and was very well regarded in its day. In fact it was almost the next Mac OS, but he overpriced the deal.
In addition he has been an excellent writer about technology businesses for years now.
If one doesn't even know what uops are, and doesn't have a mental estimate of what percentage of i7 silicon is devoted to the instruction decoder, one doesn't get to write articles comparing Intel to ARM chips.
Edit: Going back to the article I note the author is Jean-Louis Gassee, so this is just bizarre. He is kind of just talking out his ass and I would hope he'd know better than that, because whereas making stuff up is a survival skill in exec-land, being blatantly and demonstrably wrong about said make-ups is not.