Week In CPUs And Storage: Is Apple Gearing Up To Challenge Intel's Desktop CPUs?

Yet another week is in the books, and this one brings signs of change on both the storage and the CPU front. There has been rampant industry speculation lately that Apple is gearing up to replace Intel's desktop CPUs with its own proprietary chips, which would certainly fit well in the company's vertically integrated strategy, and it appears that it has built ARM compatibility in its macOS. We'll hit that topic after the short break.

SSDs have scored their first kill in the HDD wars, as Seagate released its last 15K HDD, and we suspect that 10K HDDs are next up on the chopping block. Industry pundits have been declaring that SSDs will kill the HDD for some time now, but that isn't entirely true for all applications. HDDs still offer tremendous cost advantages for high-capacity needs, but the flagging 10K and 15K HDDs designed for high-performance applications have been under duress for some time. Seagate has bowed to the inevitable rise of the SSD in the high-performance segment, leaving one to wonder if the 15K HDD is just the first 2.5" domino to fall.

Zotac threw itself a 10-year birthday party, and the bonanza included a special-edition Sonix PCIe SSD with a pimped-out shroud, a diminutive Mini PC, a special-edition water cooled GPU, and an upgraded VR Go backpack that wields a GTX 1070 for your VR pleasure. Zotac was too busy blowing out its candles to provide pricing, but the company will provide more info as the products come to market later this year.

Speaking of the death of the HDD, Intel released its new DC P3100 data center SSD series with 3D TLC NAND, which sets the benchmark for the lowest sequential performance on the market. The DC P3100 has slower sequential speed than most HDDs (and even some USB sticks). However, Intel didn't design the little SSDs for sequential workloads, so the low performance hardly matters, and the specifications don't list the burst write speed, which is a more important metric for light-use SSDs.

In either case, the DC P3100 is the first of a spate of cheap SSDs designed to replace the retiring performance-oriented HDDs, so we expect larger versions to come along and assault the last vestiges of the 2.5" HDD market.

Microsoft released a rash of new products, including its Surface Book i7 and Surface Studio, with Intel Skylake CPUs and Nvidia Maxwell GPUs. The development is interesting because Intel's Kaby Lake and Nvidia's Pascal GPUs could have also made their way into the new platform. Microsoft chose to stay with the previous-gen solutions, but still infused the platforms with eye-popping prices that range up to $3,299 for the Surface Book i7 and $4,199 or the Surface Studio. The Surface Studio also comes without an option for SSD storage, but it offers a hybrid drive instead, which could be considered a crime.

These products were likely in development before the Kaby Lake CPUs came to fruition. This class of premium products isn't always focused on pure grunt power, but it might limit the competitive window for Microsoft's latest as designs with newer architectures come to market.

Apple also got in on the previous-gen action and released its MacBook Pro with Skylake CPUs. At least Apple brought Polaris Radeon Pro and SSDs to bear along with its normal mind-bending pricing model. The latest Macbook's claim to fame (well, the most notable, considering it's using somewhat old tech) is its Touchbar, which may just be another case of Apple's attempted "innovation" run amok. As our News Director Seth Colaner noted, Apple may just be the victim of its own success on the innovation front; it's surely hard to live up to its own reputation, but the Touch Bar certainly falls below the "bar" we expect from the company. 

Chris Ramseyer put the MyDigitalSSD BPX under the magnifying glass, literally, and tested the value-centric NVMe SSD against other leading NVMe SSDs. Chris bestowed the Editor's Choice Award upon the BPX, which is a rare occurrence indeed. Head over to the review to see what all the enthusiasm is about. 

Is Apple Gearing Up To Take On Intel's CPUs?

Apple's Touch Bar may not be that exciting, but if one were to believe the word on the street, it appears that Apple might have another much larger plan lurking in the shadows. We are traipsing into "unconfirmed" territory here, which we often avoid unless there is a compelling reason to do so (which in this case, there is), so consider yourself forewarned.

Test results of Apple's iPhone 7 A10 Fusion processor recently popped up online, indicating that it scored 3490 on the Geekbench 4.0 single-core benchmark. The ARM-based A10 also purportedly has an A10X variant for the iPad that scores even higher in the benchmark (4236), but the vanilla A10 is already on competitive footing with some of Intel's Core m-series laptop processors. Given the precarious nature of TDP limitations inside of a slim iPhone, it is natural to assume that Apple could scale the A10's design upwards into larger and more powerful variants, thus providing a challenge to Intel's desktop PC dominance.

Of course, Apple's strategic intentions behind its budding chip production capabilities would likely be designed to supplant Intel CPUs in its own Mac products, as opposed to offering them to the broader enthusiast market. Unfortunately, the compatibility issue rears its ugly head. Apple based its macOS on the x86 architecture, which doesn't play nicely with ARM. Apple's possible strategy could be to simply use an enhanced version of its mobile OS for its future desktops, or perhaps it could simply engineer macOS to work on the ARM platform.

This is where the strategic maneuverings may get interesting. According to the Dutch-language Techtastic.nl, Apple has infused its macOS 10:12 Sierra kernel with compatibility for an ARM "Hurricane" family and has a mechanism to use existing apps on the platform. According to the site:

The source code shows that Apple has stopped supporting some Intel processors, including the Intel Core 2 Duo of the first generation MacBook Airs, while at the same time has added support for the ARM Hurricane family. It seems to be here a reference to one of Apple's own chipsets, as the A7 microarchitecture was described as Cyclone, the A8 as Typhoon and the A9 uses the Twister architecture, all based on the instruction sets from ARM.

The transition to a larger A10 Fusion with more cores would be quite the feat, but in light of Apple's seemingly quick developmental trajectory, it is certainly a possibility. If Intel lost Apple's business, it would equate to an immediate loss of nearly 7.4% of the desktop PC market, and since Apple's A10 cut its teeth in the mobile segment, it already has a low power focus, which means larger versions could be competitive in Intel's cash-cow data center segment.

All of this seems a bit far-fetched, and it's notable that Intel is always moving forward (albeit incrementally) on the performance front, so by the time Apple fields competing SoCs, Intel could have already surpassed them.

In either case, it's interesting. The CPU market needs more competition to push prices down and performance up, but I'm not sure that Apple is the savior that we should look to, largely due to its history of high-priced products. AMD is the clearer threat to Intel, unequivocally, but Apple seems to be making significant headway in the fast-moving semiconductor world.

It's more likely that Apple will use the mere threat of its capabilities as a crowbar to force Intel to offer it big discounts on volume CPU shipments, which it will most certainly not pass on to us. Investors, rejoice!

All of this would be great news for TSMC, which appears to have locked up A10 production due to its innovative InFO (Integrated Fan Out) packaging technique, which increases density by combining multiple chips without a substrate.