> may not have been following Apple’s silicon development closely enough to know this, especially if they think that the M1 is the first in the line.
It's not just Android commentators. A surprising amount of people have the view that Qualcomm/Google/<whoever> will surely come up with better CPUs in a couple of years. Apple has been doing this for more than 10 years. They probably spent 4 or 5 years designing A4 before it came out. And A4 came out in 2010
Apple does not just have that history, but also has the benefit of scale that others lack. The M1? It was literally just the A14X, the sequel to the A12X used in their iPad Pros, but Apple rebranded it.
Qualcomm is not going to make a better ARM Windows processor anytime soon. They had five years of exclusivity on Windows on ARM. Every single device they released was massively overpriced, had crappy performance, and until very recently, could not run 64-bit x86 programs at all (only 32-bit was translatable).
Someone is of course going to remind me that they bought Nuvia, and so Nuvia will change the boat around. I'm a skeptic. Judging by previous pricing, I believe that Qualcomm's chips and royalties result in disproportionately expensive hardware (every Windows on ARM machine to date, the cost of devices with Snapdragon 888+), and may not be competitive cost-wise as much as some would hope.
Also, Nuvia was designed for server processors, and is being retooled into a mobile processor. I'm going to bet that it's better than Qualcomm's current lot, but I doubt the single-core performance will be very strong compared to Apple. Qualcomm claims it will be "competitive with M-series," which considering M2 is going to be coming out before Nuvia isn't good news. Also, Qualcomm famously claimed that their Windows on ARM Snapdragon device was "competitive" with a mobile Core i5, but that was quickly laughed off the table when it went to reviews.
It's not just Android commentators. A surprising amount of people have the view that Qualcomm/Google/<whoever> will surely come up with better CPUs in a couple of years. Apple has been doing this for more than 10 years. They probably spent 4 or 5 years designing A4 before it came out. And A4 came out in 2010