I'm impressed with Apple's work and it reaches all the way down to the user experience (I can play GTA San Andreas on my 5s), but the pace of Intel's research over the last 10 years has been absolutely demonic. I think for Apple to compete on that front would require an extreme investment.
I guess Apple is plucking low hanging fruits, but speedup from Apple A6 to Apple A7 (spaced almost exactly a year) is about 50% in average, which corresponds to more than 2 years of speedup in recent Intel cores. I also note that this speedup was achieved without increasing clock, which is not the case for Intel.
Intel released a P4 @ 3.73GHz in 2004, and the i7-4771 is "only" 3.9GHz in single core mode (i.e. turbo), so that's only a slight increase in clock in the last decade.
Sooner or later mobile processors are going to hit the power wall. I haven't looked into this lately but one thing that could provide a fixed and permanent benefit to mobile processors is the more modern instruction set.
Well, P4's clock was achieved with 31-stage pipeline, which was a bad idea. If you compare with what came after P4, there was more than slight increase in clock.
Willamette and Northwood (ie the original P4s) cores had 20 stage pipeline, compared to Nehalem with 24 stages and Sandy, Ivy and Haswell having 19 stages.
And those Northwood cores reached 3.4GHz, compared to 3.8GHz of the infamous Prescott with it's 31 stages. That is fairly meager clockspeed increase, and based on that I'd argue that the extreme pipeline depth was not the major contributing factor in pushing the clockspeed of P4 higher.
The only reason for Intel's R&D spend over that time is that mobile chips are even more terrifying, especially once you factor in the compute capacity on the GPU.
The memory bottleneck is the real problem, but once you start getting systems conceptually related to nVidia's Tegra K1 (or even the PS4 system architecture) where the CPU is relegated to a sort of system co-ordinator Intel are going to have a major headache and find themselves in that single threaded performance niche that kept the SPARC and POWERs of the world occupied prior to their decline.
You shouldn't even get a reply considering that you're comment is pedantic and prickly. But you're flat out wrong. The worst combination for a bafoon.
nouninformal
noun: spend; plural noun: spends
1.
an amount of money paid for a particular purpose or over a particular period of time.
"the average spend at the cafe is about $10 a head"
I would be very interested to see some ARM results in that chart in the future; at the moment, all the RISCs there are pretty dismal.
Not so long ago I remember doing some calculations on the SPEC results, normalising them to a single thread and clock frequency to determine the per-cycle efficiency of various CPUs, and x86 came out at least a factor of 2-3x ahead of the rest.
For example see the second chart here: http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-...