godofbiscuits

Also, they won’t be stock A-series chips (I.e., A14X), because the SoC has to also support Mac frameworks that are deprecated (e.g., OpenCL, OpenGL, etc.) for Rosetta 2 and for othe macOS apps in Big Sur. At wwdc they said it would appear as a Metal Family GPU , which is close BUT NOT IDENTICAL to an A-series Metal soC. 

There won’t be external-to-the-SoC GPUs from Apple.  There may bot even be RAM and Flash storage external to it. 

Apple *NEVER* "has to" gain market share.  Never.  They've never made that the top priority.  Not even with the original iMac.  They made a machine then that would reintroduce Apple to the world and current Apple users bought it up, and everyone else saw it and then bought it, too.   For the transition from PPC to Intel, I have a strong feeling that Apple *DID* have other PPC machines on deck but that the Intel machines were so well received -- keep in mind that there was a strong ...tailwind?... for Apple to run on Intel anyway -- that Apple went ahead and flipped the switch on Intel across-the-board.

For Apple Silicon, it's an even easier transition, I think, because they're Apple's SoCs.  They've been tested, they've been derived from extraordinarily field-tested chips, the dev tools are FAR more mature than PPC->Intel era, etc.  

I also don't expect A-series chips to be what's used as drop-in SoC's for Macs.  For one thing, the GPUs are different, as stated by Apple during WWDC:  the GPU subsystem on the Mac AS functions as a Mac Metal Family GPU, NOT as an iOS Metal GPU: it supports OpenCL, OpenGL and possibly a few other otherwise deprecated Frameworks as a means of being compatible with Intel Macs. Apple also pointed out at WWDC that the GPU subsystem on AS was on the order of discrete GPU performance, not integrated graphics.  IOW,  AS is going to be something different and a superset of iOS GPU.  

It's exciting!  I have a feeling the first couple of products apple releases will be this:  one to show how efficient AS is and therefore how long the battery will last (lighter and cheaper), and the other product will show how performant AS is and without the need for anywhere near as much of a thermal offloading system in place (thinner/lighter, but faster)