Earlier in the week, Apple announced that it would begin its transition from Intel’s CPUs to its own ARM-based silicon processors during WWDC 2020. Now it’s come to light that one of the reasons behind Tim Cook’s decision to dump the chipmaker was due to an “abnormally bad” quality assurance of its Skylake architecture.
The bold claim comes from Francois Piednoel, who once served as Intel’s Principal Engineer. Piednoel made the revelation during an online streaming session. Saying that the issues with Intel’s Skylake CPUs got so bad at a point, it was Apple who became the semiconductor maker’s top complainer of the architecture.
For Piednoel, the barrage of complaints and issues with the Skylake architecture was most likely the tipping for Apple that solidified its decision to make the shift from its years-long dependency on Intel’s chips to switching over to ARM, wholesale.
Apple’s quick-snap decision is, both unsurprisingly and undoubtedly, a massive slap in the face for Intel, and the sting is definitely there. Around the same time, Qualcomm was reportedly prepared to go head-to-head with Intel, with its own Snapdragon 1000 ARM-based SoC for laptops that were capable of running Windows 10 OS and boasting far superior battery life than Intel’s CPUs at the time.
To Intel’s respite, Qualcomm’s endeavours stayed merely as a pipedream, although it should be noted that the mobile semiconductor maker had released a Qualcomm-powered notebook in the form of the ASUS NovaGo back in 2017, but even that machine was simply powered by the now archaic Snapdragon 835 SoC.
(Source: PCGamer)
