The reason why the A8X has so many transistors is because it's an SoC, which means "system on a chip". All of the support functions that would be carried by external chips are on that. In addition, as has been said, Apple includes a camera processing chip which most (or all) other SoC's don't.
We also don't know what approximately 35% of the chip area is being used for. That's possibly a billion transistors.
However, after almost ten years of investment into XScale, Intel had seen few hit products using the chips and lots of duds (Palm Treos, Pocket PCs from Compaq and Dell, and Creative Zen MP3 players).
Calling the Palm Treos and the Creative Zen MP3 players duds is unfair. The Palm Treo was America's favourite smartphone for a good few years and the Zen was (an admittedly distant) second only to the iPod.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
The relatively generic, Samsung-manufactured APL0098 chip that Apple used in the original iPhone (featuring an ARM11 CPU using ARMv6 instruction set, built using 90nm process) was far more powerful than the ARM7TDMI (ARMv4) processors Apple used in the first iPod (and which powered most Nokia phones and Nintendo's GameBoy Advance). They were, in turn, far more powerful than the original ARM6 (ARMv3) and StrongARM (ARMv4) chips used in Newton MessagePads from the 1990s.
Nokia's smartphone line were firmly on ARM11 by the time that the original iPhone was released. The first Nokia smartphone to use an ARM11 application processor was released in Q1 2007.
It has always seemed to me that Apple’s partners consistently drop the ball at critical times. Moto and IBM didn’t advance the PPC to keep up with Intel X86 development. Nvidia, ATI, Radius all screwed up on graphics cards and hurt Apple. Even today we have third party graphics causing trouble, namely the MacBook Pro lawsuits. So it would seem both logical and good business for Apple to develop critical hardware chips in house. But then the question of who does the fabrication arises. I’m sure Apple is not interested in getting into the fab business itself but maybe they will have to one day.
To be fair, a number of those problems hit most every other computer manufacturer as well. Dell had to recall about 28,000 laptops from one line because of the Nvidia screwup. Hp needed to recall about 100,000 computers, and numerous other companies had similar problems. It was so bad, thar when Nvidia finally admitted they screwed up, they had to put $500 million into an escro account to pay manufacturers for repairs.
Motorola was ticked at Apple because they withdrew the cloning business. Motorola put several hundred million into that when that was a lot of money, and Apple pulled the rug from under them. They argued that as Apple's chip manufacturer, they should be allowed to continue to build their very highly rated (and expensive) Mac clones.
In addition, with Microsoft pulling the plug from their PPC Windows NT edition, it was really only Apple holding the processor line up. With just a few million CPUs a year, it was too expensive to keep pace with intel in R&D of the processors, or the fabs. Even IBM had problems with that.
A lot of Apple's problems came because they were so small. It didn't pay to build something special if they were just going to sell a few percent of their total sales to Apple users. I get that.
Can someone explain to me why does A8 chip have 3 billion transistors compared to Intel's (Haswell' i7) 1.4 billion transistors?
Apple has achieved rather high transistor densities in its latest processors, probably the most under reported tech news of 2014.
Consider that Intels Broadwell is actually a multi chip module with a "bridge" chip in the package, in older chips that bridge chip is external. That right there is a lot of functionality that Apple builds into their SoC. So Apple is supporting a bunch of serial interfaces on its silicon to interface to the world and to internal hardware (cameras).
On top of all of that Apple A8 series chips have high performance GPUs, hardware video encode and decode built in. There is a massive amount of silicon devoted to camera processing which impart explains Apples excellent cameras. You have the flash controller, basically the SSD brain built into the chip. You have audio processing built into the chip including a complete DSP subsystem for noise canceling during phone calls.
Most likely I've missed a few things but if you take a look at the tear downs of Apples chips you will notice a massive amount of die space that is not identified as eightee GPU, CPUs, nor caches. It is a good portion of the chip that is allocated to "other things".
All in all Apples chips are far more impressive than people give them credit for. Even DED here seems to ignore the rather awesome technical capability that Apple has wedged into its chips.
If I remember right PA Semi had been able to design ARM chips to be less power hungry that normal, which won them some government contracts before Apple bought them. If so, this would mean that Apple started with a leg up on design. There's no way of knowing if this "edge" brought to the table by PA Semi still is paying off, but I suspect Apple is still leading in processor design for power consumption due to PA Semi's design expertise in power management.
One of the other things Apple bought when they acquired Anobit was a unique way of refreshing solid-state memory to preserve it's ability to be rewritten more often over a longer period of time. I don't know if this also involved an energy expenditure savings, but it should see the Apple iDevices holding their value further into the future when brand x memory hit their end-of-life due to their different memory controllers.
Can someone explain to me why does A8 chip have 3 billion transistors compared to Intel's (Haswell' i7) 1.4 billion transistors?
Apple has achieved rather high transistor densities in its latest processors, probably the most under reported tech news of 2014.
Consider that Intels Broadwell is actually a multi chip module with a "bridge" chip in the package, in older chips that bridge chip is external. That right there is a lot of functionality that Apple builds into their SoC. So Apple is supporting a bunch of serial interfaces on its silicon to interface to the world and to internal hardware (cameras).
On top of all of that Apple A8 series chips have high performance GPUs, hardware video encode and decode built in. There is a massive amount of silicon devoted to camera processing which impart explains Apples excellent cameras. You have the flash controller, basically the SSD brain built into the chip. You have audio processing built into the chip including a complete DSP subsystem for noise canceling during phone calls.
Most likely I've missed a few things but if you take a look at the tear downs of Apples chips you will notice a massive amount of die space that is not identified as eightee GPU, CPUs, nor caches. It is a good portion of the chip that is allocated to "other things".
All in all Apples chips are far more impressive than people give them credit for. Even DED here seems to ignore the rather awesome technical capability that Apple has wedged into its chips.
All these things (and even more) you describe is due to Apple's ability to design their own chips in custom detail. It makes me wonder if most competitors would find that an impossibility to do? Apple compounds their custom advantage by buying the final product is such huge quantities that their price is likely lower then an off-the-shelf chip.
Another thing that Apple's SoC does is communicate with the M7/8 chip which handles all the needed finger print ID and encryption storage.
Intel has a license for ARM IP and has had it for as long as Apple has had it. Intel never bought into the smartphone revolution, never mind the iPad/Tablet revolution.
They are a wait and see corporation. Steve did something this time he never did prior to the iPhone/iPad. He invested in bring bumper-to-bumper hardware/OS development in-house and it has paid hugely.
Intel will never convince Apple to use their Atom based mobile chips.
Moore's Law is about to implode thanks to Quantum Mechanics so the idea that Intel will die shrink and power shrink over ARM is something any informed person of physics will laugh at.
Intel has to focus, like AMD and others on material science engineering of exotic materials that end the Silcon era.
The world of computing will be quite different and the company better positioned is the one spear heading LLVM/Clang and OS X/iOS. Software development for heavily parallel designed solutions that are auto-vectorized at all levels of optimization eek out every power savings and time savings possible.
R&D in Physics materials will serve Apple well, now and in the future.
Intel's choke-hold on the PC/workstation world is coming to an end, not because of ARM, but because of Moore's Law ending.
Intel has a license for ARM IP and has had it for as long as Apple has had it. Intel never bought into the smartphone revolution, never mind the iPad/Tablet revolution.
They are a wait and see corporation. Steve did something this time he never did prior to the iPhone/iPad. He invested in bring bumper-to-bumper hardware/OS development in-house and it has paid hugely.
Intel will never convince Apple to use their Atom based mobile chips.
Moore's Law is about to implode thanks to Quantum Mechanics so the idea that Intel will die shrink and power shrink over ARM is something any informed person of physics will laugh at.
Intel has to focus, like AMD and others on material science engineering of exotic materials that end the Silcon era.
The world of computing will be quite different and the company better positioned is the one spear heading LLVM/Clang and OS X/iOS. Software development for heavily parallel designed solutions that are auto-vectorized at all levels of optimization eek out every power savings and time savings possible.
R&D in Physics materials will serve Apple well, now and in the future.
Intel's choke-hold on the PC/workstation world is coming to an end, not because of ARM, but because of Moore's Law ending.
Basically all true.
But it's amazing that AMD's newest chips are still on 32nm. 32nm!! Intels comparable part is 125 watts, while AMD's is 220 watts. So far as x86 goes, Intel is still far ahead.
We'll see what happens four, or so, years from now.
this was a good article. not sure why someone thinks this site is in bed with amd as they rarely talk about that company.
i have always been wowed how apple identifies a problem or potential problem in their supply chain and changes it. such as making their own chips for the phone or the new chip for the iMac. i wish they would get into the battery business.
I don't think that there is any question that Apple makes the most powerful ARM processors out there for mobile devices, but is it fair to say that Apple is the reason for Intel's piss-poor state in mobile chips? Android smartphones have something like 80 percent of the global smartphone market, and they're all running "Other" ARM processors from Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc.
Even if Intel supplied ALL of Apple's mobile processors, there is still a VAST untapped market from the "Other" category.
Or am I looking at this the wrong way?
Intel, like Microsoft, didn't anticipate the mobile computer/device/phone wave coming. Jobs even tried to clue Intel into fabbing the ARM chips for Apple. But the profits per ARM chip was a fraction of what Intel was getting for each x86 chip they sold. So when the wave hit, Intel and Microsoft were caught flat-footed and the scramble took until now to have a viable product to offer. Intel's now-shipping power-sipping x86 chip needs to be marketing at far less then the old x86 chips because, like this forum shows, ARM is now approaching viability as a alternative option.
So, to answer your question directly, Intel put themselves in their own weak position. However, Apple fueled a faster change to a need for mobile chips than we would have seen if Apple hadn't become a player in portable phones/tablets/computers. Imagine, for a moment, where we'd be today if Apple were not part of the equation...
How little intelligence would a phone have? Would it still have a qwerty keyboard?
Would Microsoft have ever released a tablet one could carry around? Would we still read our Amazon eBooks on our desktop computer screen?
FInally, would laptop computers still weight about what they did in the early years of this century and cost about as much too?
"Can someone explain to me why does A8 chip have 3 billion transistors compared to Intel's (Haswell' i7) 1.4 billion transistors?"
Good question - I wondered the same thing and with so many transistors packed in, how come it doesn't run hot at all compared to x86 chip of similar count?!?
The other primary factor that account for power dissipation, besides transistor count, is clock frequency.
In this case, clock frequency is even more important in keeping low dissipation (and longer battery life) because power dissipation is roughly proportional to the square of clock frequency.
And we all know that the clock frequency in iOS devices is quite lower than the others "so called" feature compatible offers of smartphones and tablets, and definitely much lower than typical clock speeds in x86 processors
This and OS-side technologies help in keeping power dissipation to a minimum.
this was a good article. not sure why someone thinks this site is in bed with amd as they rarely talk about that company.
i have always been wowed how apple identifies a problem or potential problem in their supply chain and changes it. such as making their own chips for the phone or the new chip for the iMac. i wish they would get into the battery business.
Apple's entry into designing their own chips wasn't a supply chain problem but was a desire to control their own speed of HW advancement. (probably learned from the problem they had with RISC CPUs a few years earlier) If you look at Apple's strategic acquisitions over the last half-decade, they mostly give Apple more freedom of their product design advances. The more custom Apple is, the more they can offer their customers while making it harder and harder for their competitors to keep up.
Apple is huge in the battery business! They do not use off-the-shelf batteries like most of the phone competitors. In some regards Apple batteries are better then those found in brand X devices and are custom-made to fit each product's unique space and specs.
More anti-Intel AI propoganda? I believe AI is in AMD's pocket, on the take! How many similar smear stories will AI publish this month? What BS! Does this rag have Alzheimers? What a joke! Or at least change the name to Intel Insider.
I didn't quote the rest of constipated thinking since is was BS from start to end. All of the AI stories you referenced were good articles that provoked a lot of interest shown by the volume of comments generated. Intel is lagging the field lately. Apple, for one, has been left waiting to release new products due to Intel's inability to lead the market in several areas.
In addition Apple is cranking up the speed of innovation putting pressure on all of its chip manufacturers to shrink die details. lower energy requirements, and generally do more using less space while using less energy. Those lazy days of 2006 and before are over; it's shit results or be left in the dust.
The problem isn't just clueless component, slow-moving CPU and SoC chip suppliers, but extends to companies like "Windows everywhere" Microsoft and several other once-powerful HW suppliers... some of which are no longer in business,
It's interesting to see how Apple plays these two in different directions with various products.
With iPhone/iPad, it's entirely on battery life. But with MBP, for example, it's management of heat. So MBPs have a fan - in order to dissipate heat - rather than reducing performance and eliminating the fan. Of course, Apple would love to have the performance with no fan but, if push comes to shove, they'll accept the fan and the battery power it consumes.
Wall Street has never given Apple stock a premium value for making the effort of developing their own chips in-house. Ax processors are considered to be no better than any other smartphone or tablet processor on the market. In fact, Wall Street and the rest of the industry sees them as being inferior because they don't run as high a clock speed or have as many cores as rival chips do. In the industry, having greater specs on paper means everything. Apple was laughed at for having the first 64-bit mobile processor and Apple has gotten no respect for having it all this time while rivals laggardly introduce their own 64-bit mobile processors. Apple gets no respect now and will likely get even less respect in the future for possibly offering other mobile products using their own Ax processors.
Despite the claims that Intel has lost about $7 billion dollars over the last few years with their mobile processors, if you lay Apple's share price and Intel's share price gains over the past 52 weeks, you'll see that Intel's share price gains are certainly greater than Apple's with Intel handily having a higher P/E ratio than Apple. That's how Wall Street investors see Apple as an inferior company even to Intel. It doesn't matter how pro-Apple people and Apple shareholders see Apple, Wall Street sees Apple in a totally different light. Apple would seem to be on fire but it makes no difference to Wall Street that sees Apple as a has-been company and always loses market share to everyone. Intel is seen as having a bright future with much potential growth and Apple not so much of either.
Wall Street has never given Apple stock a premium value for making the effort of developing their own chips in-house. Ax processors are considered to be no better than any other smartphone or tablet processor on the market. In fact, Wall Street and the rest of the industry sees them as being inferior because they don't run as high a clock speed or have as many cores as rival chips do. In the industry, having greater specs on paper means everything. Apple was laughed at for having the first 64-bit mobile processor and Apple has gotten no respect for having it all this time while rivals laggardly introduce their own 64-bit mobile processors. Apple gets no respect now and will likely get even less respect in the future for possibly offering other mobile products using their own Ax processors.
Actually, the industry and media were completely surprised by the sudden appearance of the 64-bit A7 processor, and many of Apple's competitors quickly admitted that they were surprised or caught off guard.
Now all of them are feverishly working on 64-bit ARM CPUs which is the ultimate respect. They try to play up better specs to their advantage, but the fact of the matter is that they have *TONS* of admiration for what Apple has done in their chip design.
The media? Well, the ones that cover the electronics industry were suitably impressed, but the general media just doesn't grasp those types of grand changes very quickly.
The financial markets have arguably undervalued Apple's accomplishments as they have done for many years, but Apple still outperforms its peers, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq index, etc.
It's interesting to see how Apple plays these two in different directions with various products.
With iPhone/iPad, it's entirely on battery life. But with MBP, for example, it's management of heat. So MBPs have a fan - in order to dissipate heat - rather than reducing performance and eliminating the fan. Of course, Apple would love to have the performance with no fan but, if push comes to shove, they'll accept the fan and the battery power it consumes.
I'm still sticking to my early last year prediction that Apple goes to piezo electric fans, which are flat, super quiet, and very power efficient.
Comments
We also don't know what approximately 35% of the chip area is being used for. That's possibly a billion transistors.
However, after almost ten years of investment into XScale, Intel had seen few hit products using the chips and lots of duds (Palm Treos, Pocket PCs from Compaq and Dell, and Creative Zen MP3 players).
Calling the Palm Treos and the Creative Zen MP3 players duds is unfair. The Palm Treo was America's favourite smartphone for a good few years and the Zen was (an admittedly distant) second only to the iPod.
Quote:
The relatively generic, Samsung-manufactured APL0098 chip that Apple used in the original iPhone (featuring an ARM11 CPU using ARMv6 instruction set, built using 90nm process) was far more powerful than the ARM7TDMI (ARMv4) processors Apple used in the first iPod (and which powered most Nokia phones and Nintendo's GameBoy Advance). They were, in turn, far more powerful than the original ARM6 (ARMv3) and StrongARM (ARMv4) chips used in Newton MessagePads from the 1990s.
Nokia's smartphone line were firmly on ARM11 by the time that the original iPhone was released. The first Nokia smartphone to use an ARM11 application processor was released in Q1 2007.
To be fair, a number of those problems hit most every other computer manufacturer as well. Dell had to recall about 28,000 laptops from one line because of the Nvidia screwup. Hp needed to recall about 100,000 computers, and numerous other companies had similar problems. It was so bad, thar when Nvidia finally admitted they screwed up, they had to put $500 million into an escro account to pay manufacturers for repairs.
Motorola was ticked at Apple because they withdrew the cloning business. Motorola put several hundred million into that when that was a lot of money, and Apple pulled the rug from under them. They argued that as Apple's chip manufacturer, they should be allowed to continue to build their very highly rated (and expensive) Mac clones.
In addition, with Microsoft pulling the plug from their PPC Windows NT edition, it was really only Apple holding the processor line up. With just a few million CPUs a year, it was too expensive to keep pace with intel in R&D of the processors, or the fabs. Even IBM had problems with that.
A lot of Apple's problems came because they were so small. It didn't pay to build something special if they were just going to sell a few percent of their total sales to Apple users. I get that.
Apple has achieved rather high transistor densities in its latest processors, probably the most under reported tech news of 2014.
Consider that Intels Broadwell is actually a multi chip module with a "bridge" chip in the package, in older chips that bridge chip is external. That right there is a lot of functionality that Apple builds into their SoC. So Apple is supporting a bunch of serial interfaces on its silicon to interface to the world and to internal hardware (cameras).
On top of all of that Apple A8 series chips have high performance GPUs, hardware video encode and decode built in. There is a massive amount of silicon devoted to camera processing which impart explains Apples excellent cameras. You have the flash controller, basically the SSD brain built into the chip. You have audio processing built into the chip including a complete DSP subsystem for noise canceling during phone calls.
Most likely I've missed a few things but if you take a look at the tear downs of Apples chips you will notice a massive amount of die space that is not identified as eightee GPU, CPUs, nor caches. It is a good portion of the chip that is allocated to "other things".
All in all Apples chips are far more impressive than people give them credit for. Even DED here seems to ignore the rather awesome technical capability that Apple has wedged into its chips.
If I remember right PA Semi had been able to design ARM chips to be less power hungry that normal, which won them some government contracts before Apple bought them. If so, this would mean that Apple started with a leg up on design. There's no way of knowing if this "edge" brought to the table by PA Semi still is paying off, but I suspect Apple is still leading in processor design for power consumption due to PA Semi's design expertise in power management.
One of the other things Apple bought when they acquired Anobit was a unique way of refreshing solid-state memory to preserve it's ability to be rewritten more often over a longer period of time. I don't know if this also involved an energy expenditure savings, but it should see the Apple iDevices holding their value further into the future when brand x memory hit their end-of-life due to their different memory controllers.
TDP is the key. As is x86.
All these things (and even more) you describe is due to Apple's ability to design their own chips in custom detail. It makes me wonder if most competitors would find that an impossibility to do? Apple compounds their custom advantage by buying the final product is such huge quantities that their price is likely lower then an off-the-shelf chip.
Another thing that Apple's SoC does is communicate with the M7/8 chip which handles all the needed finger print ID and encryption storage.
They are a wait and see corporation. Steve did something this time he never did prior to the iPhone/iPad. He invested in bring bumper-to-bumper hardware/OS development in-house and it has paid hugely.
Intel will never convince Apple to use their Atom based mobile chips.
Moore's Law is about to implode thanks to Quantum Mechanics so the idea that Intel will die shrink and power shrink over ARM is something any informed person of physics will laugh at.
Intel has to focus, like AMD and others on material science engineering of exotic materials that end the Silcon era.
The world of computing will be quite different and the company better positioned is the one spear heading LLVM/Clang and OS X/iOS. Software development for heavily parallel designed solutions that are auto-vectorized at all levels of optimization eek out every power savings and time savings possible.
R&D in Physics materials will serve Apple well, now and in the future.
Intel's choke-hold on the PC/workstation world is coming to an end, not because of ARM, but because of Moore's Law ending.
Basically all true.
But it's amazing that AMD's newest chips are still on 32nm. 32nm!! Intels comparable part is 125 watts, while AMD's is 220 watts. So far as x86 goes, Intel is still far ahead.
We'll see what happens four, or so, years from now.
this was a good article. not sure why someone thinks this site is in bed with amd as they rarely talk about that company.
i have always been wowed how apple identifies a problem or potential problem in their supply chain and changes it. such as making their own chips for the phone or the new chip for the iMac. i wish they would get into the battery business.
Intel, like Microsoft, didn't anticipate the mobile computer/device/phone wave coming. Jobs even tried to clue Intel into fabbing the ARM chips for Apple. But the profits per ARM chip was a fraction of what Intel was getting for each x86 chip they sold. So when the wave hit, Intel and Microsoft were caught flat-footed and the scramble took until now to have a viable product to offer. Intel's now-shipping power-sipping x86 chip needs to be marketing at far less then the old x86 chips because, like this forum shows, ARM is now approaching viability as a alternative option.
So, to answer your question directly, Intel put themselves in their own weak position. However, Apple fueled a faster change to a need for mobile chips than we would have seen if Apple hadn't become a player in portable phones/tablets/computers. Imagine, for a moment, where we'd be today if Apple were not part of the equation...
The other primary factor that account for power dissipation, besides transistor count, is clock frequency.
In this case, clock frequency is even more important in keeping low dissipation (and longer battery life) because power dissipation is roughly proportional to the square of clock frequency.
And we all know that the clock frequency in iOS devices is quite lower than the others "so called" feature compatible offers of smartphones and tablets, and definitely much lower than typical clock speeds in x86 processors
This and OS-side technologies help in keeping power dissipation to a minimum.
Apple's entry into designing their own chips wasn't a supply chain problem but was a desire to control their own speed of HW advancement. (probably learned from the problem they had with RISC CPUs a few years earlier) If you look at Apple's strategic acquisitions over the last half-decade, they mostly give Apple more freedom of their product design advances. The more custom Apple is, the more they can offer their customers while making it harder and harder for their competitors to keep up.
Apple is huge in the battery business! They do not use off-the-shelf batteries like most of the phone competitors. In some regards Apple batteries are better then those found in brand X devices and are custom-made to fit each product's unique space and specs.
I didn't quote the rest of constipated thinking since is was BS from start to end. All of the AI stories you referenced were good articles that provoked a lot of interest shown by the volume of comments generated. Intel is lagging the field lately. Apple, for one, has been left waiting to release new products due to Intel's inability to lead the market in several areas.
In addition Apple is cranking up the speed of innovation putting pressure on all of its chip manufacturers to shrink die details. lower energy requirements, and generally do more using less space while using less energy. Those lazy days of 2006 and before are over; it's shit results or be left in the dust.
The problem isn't just clueless component, slow-moving CPU and SoC chip suppliers, but extends to companies like "Windows everywhere" Microsoft and several other once-powerful HW suppliers... some of which are no longer in business,
TDP is the key. As is x86.
And "TDP" actually means "battery life". Mostly.
It's interesting to see how Apple plays these two in different directions with various products.
With iPhone/iPad, it's entirely on battery life. But with MBP, for example, it's management of heat. So MBPs have a fan - in order to dissipate heat - rather than reducing performance and eliminating the fan. Of course, Apple would love to have the performance with no fan but, if push comes to shove, they'll accept the fan and the battery power it consumes.
Didn't you run this same article a couple weeks ago AI?
There was one on ARM vs. x86 but this is not the same.
Similar territory, different view and details. This has a lot more about Intel as a company and their vision - or lack of it.
5 years from now, perhaps, the rest of the industry will grasp what has happened, and again attempt to copy Apple.
Get your stock while you can. sweet mercy.
How right he was then!!!Wall Street has never given Apple stock a premium value for making the effort of developing their own chips in-house. Ax processors are considered to be no better than any other smartphone or tablet processor on the market. In fact, Wall Street and the rest of the industry sees them as being inferior because they don't run as high a clock speed or have as many cores as rival chips do. In the industry, having greater specs on paper means everything. Apple was laughed at for having the first 64-bit mobile processor and Apple has gotten no respect for having it all this time while rivals laggardly introduce their own 64-bit mobile processors. Apple gets no respect now and will likely get even less respect in the future for possibly offering other mobile products using their own Ax processors.
Despite the claims that Intel has lost about $7 billion dollars over the last few years with their mobile processors, if you lay Apple's share price and Intel's share price gains over the past 52 weeks, you'll see that Intel's share price gains are certainly greater than Apple's with Intel handily having a higher P/E ratio than Apple. That's how Wall Street investors see Apple as an inferior company even to Intel. It doesn't matter how pro-Apple people and Apple shareholders see Apple, Wall Street sees Apple in a totally different light. Apple would seem to be on fire but it makes no difference to Wall Street that sees Apple as a has-been company and always loses market share to everyone. Intel is seen as having a bright future with much potential growth and Apple not so much of either.
Wall Street has never given Apple stock a premium value for making the effort of developing their own chips in-house. Ax processors are considered to be no better than any other smartphone or tablet processor on the market. In fact, Wall Street and the rest of the industry sees them as being inferior because they don't run as high a clock speed or have as many cores as rival chips do. In the industry, having greater specs on paper means everything. Apple was laughed at for having the first 64-bit mobile processor and Apple has gotten no respect for having it all this time while rivals laggardly introduce their own 64-bit mobile processors. Apple gets no respect now and will likely get even less respect in the future for possibly offering other mobile products using their own Ax processors.
Actually, the industry and media were completely surprised by the sudden appearance of the 64-bit A7 processor, and many of Apple's competitors quickly admitted that they were surprised or caught off guard.
Now all of them are feverishly working on 64-bit ARM CPUs which is the ultimate respect. They try to play up better specs to their advantage, but the fact of the matter is that they have *TONS* of admiration for what Apple has done in their chip design.
The media? Well, the ones that cover the electronics industry were suitably impressed, but the general media just doesn't grasp those types of grand changes very quickly.
The financial markets have arguably undervalued Apple's accomplishments as they have done for many years, but Apple still outperforms its peers, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq index, etc.
I'm still sticking to my early last year prediction that Apple goes to piezo electric fans, which are flat, super quiet, and very power efficient.