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A couple of months ago, word got out that Google was designing its own smartphone chipset. Although a similar talk has been circulating on the Internet for years, Google itself has never commented on such speculation, and never confirmed its plans to enter the processor game. Meanwhile, at WWDC this week, Apple doubled down on its commitment to chips in the biggest way ever. All of that has me, as a lifelong Android user, feeling more than a little envious right now.
Apple has announced that it will transition the latest in its product line that does not use Apple’s chipsets to the company’s own processors. That means the MacBook, Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro will soon be (relatively speaking, in the next two years) with the same type of ARM cores you’ll find inside an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. They will be bigger, faster, and more capable, but they will be the same basic family of chips, allowing Apple to do everything from dramatically reducing power consumption on its laptops to greatly reducing the heat produced by its desktop computers, for (potentially) adding things like mobile data connectivity to Mac. The list of possible advantages is really overwhelming; Just think of everything a smartphone or tablet does better than a laptop, and you’ll quickly begin to understand why the move makes so much sense.
Apple is using a system, most likely fanless, on a chip to loop around the latest and greatest in Intel.
A great example of such perks came when Apple demonstrated that a console-class video game (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a game released in 2018) could run on an iPad Pro chipset on Mac OS. The demo wasn’t perfect: The game ran at 1080p in a fairly medium setting, but it did what appeared to be at least a stable 30FPS, all while running as an x86 emulated version of the game. That is: the game wasn’t even natively compiled for ARM. But note that Intel’s most powerful laptop chipset GPU, found in the 10th generation Ice Lake series, is not capable of breaking single-digit frame rates in this game at 1080p. Apple received some criticism that this demo is unconvincing, but it’s only unfortunate if you don’t understand absolutely just how awful modern integrated laptop GPUs are. Apple is using a system, most likely fanless, on a chip to loop around the latest and greatest in Intel. There is nothing from Intel that has a more powerful GPU. Oh, and all the evidence suggests that you’re doing this at less than half the cost of using that Intel chip. That is not only impressive, it is absolutely crazy.
And this is where things start to seem a little worrisome to Google. It is becoming increasingly clear that Apple is beginning to escape with its leadership in the chipset war, and that vendors like Intel and Qualcomm simply cannot match Apple’s obsession when it comes to silicon. This is, in part, because Qualcomm and Intel operate businesses very different from Apple. Apple has a client: Apple. Apple just needs to build the chipset designs that Apples knows it wants for the limited portfolio of products it sells. Because those products sell on such an immense scale, that shared chipset platform reaps huge returns on investment, as it can be widely applied across Apple’s entire range of products. Suppliers like Qualcomm and Intel must try to meet customer needs not only at different prices, but also with different priorities and strategies. This makes maintaining a wide variety of chip options paramount, distributing resources across multiple product families that serve multiple customer families.
For Google’s hardware division, a group that largely builds aspirational, relatively high-end products it wants to define as an integrated ecosystem, this makes working with people like Intel or Qualcomm less than ideal. For example, when Google released Pixel Slate in 2018, Intel’s Kaby Lake R CPUs had a difficult time with the tablet’s high-density display, with endless reports of lag until Google “fixed” the problem in a series of updates. . Still, the tablet continued to struggle with things like 4K video playback and gaming, due to the relatively graphics-poor Intel chipset. Last year, when Google launched Pixelbook Go, I learned that Google was not internally satisfied with the performance of the 4K model, and those complaints are specifically attributed to the lack of power and the happy nature of Intel’s i7 chip accelerator.
There’s no super-secret chip that Qualcomm can build that’s really better than Apple’s A-series chips, if only Google were to fund the effort.
On the smartphone side, Google’s relationship with Qualcomm is still seemingly pleasant, but there’s no denying that Qualcomm’s expensive smartphone chips have forced it to place its phones in a way that only compares poorly with Apple. – It’s not just Google’s Pixel phones that are slower on most key benchmarks than Apple, although cheaper, they generally have a lower value. Apple’s latest iPhones feature more cameras, more storage options, better displays, faster charging, more powerful haptics and speakers, nicer materials, and they do so while delivering demonstrably superior performance and in some cases far Superior performance like the GPU. This is not to say that Google phones don’t have redeeming qualities, they absolutely do, like photo processing and artificial intelligence on the device (and, of course, Android itself), but that even if Google were to hit against Apple in features would still face an impossible-to-break barrier on the chipset side. There’s no super-secret chip Qualcomm can build that’s really better than Apple’s A-series chips, if only Google were to fund the effort. For example, Qualcomm’s GPUs are not much less powerful than Apple’s, they are vastly less efficient. That’s not something you can just spend, you need legitimate technology advances
This isn’t even to talk about wearables, where Qualcomm and Intel have basically disappointed Google’s wholesale Wear OS platform (and why I think Google is so guilty, frankly). Smartwatches are simply not shipped in large enough quantities for these companies to commit the massive resources necessary to design innovative and highly competitive solutions. They are going to build what works and what they think their customers will buy.
I came out of today’s WWDC announcement feeling a little jealous.
Thinking about all this, I came out of today’s WWDC announcement feeling a little jealous. Jealous that Apple’s tightly integrated hardware approach, coupled with its walled garden software, would put legitimately useful features and integrations out of my reach unless I switch to iOS. Jealous that my (relatively) new laptop is likely to have circles around it in graphics, battery, and connectivity for any next-gen Apple MacBook ARMs leaving next year. Jealous that I still can’t get a portable Android device that doesn’t stink.
I do not pretend to have commercial and technical knowledge about the feasibility of Google looking for a model more similar to Apple when it comes to designing and obtaining hardware. It may be that Apple’s leadership in ARM chips is so far away that Google could never hope to catch up without spending truly ridiculous sums of money, money that could never guarantee that it would see a return. Designing chips is not like designing a sports car; You can’t just look at the competition, attack the parts container, and expect it to hit some key performance benchmarks. These are incredibly complicated things that are being investigated by people who are at the absolute forefront of computing and electrical engineering. Still, Apple has shown that it can be done. “Not impossible” is not an easy bar to find, but nonetheless: the bar does exist.
