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Well ok but by that theory Dec Alpha or HP PA should have dominated?



Neither had the underlying single enormous vertically integrated market slice.

Apple has and had the iPhone. Apple started using their own chips, the A5, about 10 years ago. (In 2011 March, starting with the iPad 2. And they used ARM before that too.) And since then Apple optimized the "supply chain", incremental steps, but when you are Apple every step can be almost revolutionary (and year after year Steve told exactly that to the believers, and it's basically true, just not on actual feature front, but on hardware and systems level - eg. Gorilla glass for the phones, power efficiency, the oversized battery for the MBP, milling, machining, marketing, design, and so on).


Both examples were chips that were basically bought by Intel. The Alpha was a monster, and the PA ended up being replaced by the Itanium.




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