Ars Technica Interviews Anand Shimpi and Phil Schiller About the A12X ⇥ arstechnica.com

Samuel Axon, Ars Technica:

If you’ve read our iPad Pro review, you know most of those claims hold up. Apple’s latest iOS devices aren’t perfect, but even the platform’s biggest detractors recognize that the company is leading the market when it comes to mobile CPU and GPU performance—not by a little, but by a lot. It’s all done on custom silicon designed within Apple—a different approach than that taken by any mainstream Android or Windows device.

But not every consumer—even the “professional” target consumer of the iPad Pro—really groks the fact this gap is so big. How is this possible? What does this architecture actually look like? Why is Apple doing this, and how did it get here?

After the hardware announcements last week, Ars sat down with Anand Shimpi from Hardware Technologies at Apple and Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller to ask. We wanted to hear exactly what Apple is trying to accomplish by making its own chips and how the A12X is architected. It turns out that the iPad Pro’s striking, console-level graphics performance and many of the other headlining features in new Apple devices (like FaceID and various augmented-reality applications) may not be possible any other way.

Every passing year that Intel drops the ball is another reinforcement that Apple’s $278 million purchase of P.A. Semi ten years ago was the deal of the century, especially when they announce that they’re building a MacBook on their own architecture.