Apple did this right. They practiced the chip development over and over. Once they forced 64-bit on 10.15, and knowing the FreeBSD and Mach kernel would smoke anything with ARM.

Folks that crush on x86 have to realize for.the past decade Intel has done next to nothing for performance. It was power reduction and increasing cores and using minor tricks which got laid bare with Spectre.

My experience is in PAC testing (performance) and I had 2009 AMD kit out running 2016 Intel gear. No Joke.

So folks are clutching pearls with disbelief. I am not. If Microsoft didn’t screw the pooch with x64 emulators, we could have seen a major shift.

Microsoft and Apple have been doing this dance with alternative processors. Xbox and PS3 is an example. In fact a lot of smart guys and gals from IBM went to a small Startup in San Diego (Qualcomm)

UMA is huge. RISC is laughing hard core now, and CISC may be setting into the dying sun. The only way CISC and x86 lives is via AMD, and it will need AMD to up the frequency and do some magic with SOC, which can be done. But, it won’t compete on a power/watt view.

80 core ARM chips?

This is all great stuff for us all. Apple has a nice 2 year lead. If the Rosetta holds up they can gain market share.