If someone had told me 5 years ago that there would be serious threads in 2013 about Apple's chip designs vs. Intel's, I would have laughed. In this short period of time Apple has oved from being a chip customer to arguably a leading ARM chip designer and supplier... even though their supply only goes to themselves.
All true. Although remember that everything here (industry expertise, manufacturing, design, R&D) depends pretty much just on one thing -
money to burn.
Disregarding Apple's current state for the meantime (whatever state it is):
1.) Why does Intel have the best fabs available?
They have the most money. They spend a lot more on fabs, even investing in tool vendors for tooling development.
2.) Why can they afford to have better design teams and more advanced tech in their processors?
They spend a lot more money than AMD - pay people higher salaries for all the industry expertise they need, they have much more of these people, and these engineers get a lot more in the way of tools to help facilitate their specific jobs.
It's how the "R&D magic" happens -> The dollar investment is generally directly proportional to resulting tech. Bigger investment, cooler tech.
And Apple is sitting on a truckload of cash (how much is it now? 100-150B?), and we've all heard reports from way back about how they were scooping up (pirating) the needed expertise to design processors. Again, nothing magical, it's not because they are Apple. It's simply because the effort/initiative needed money, and Apple had money and were willing to use it. And so we have the current iteration of their processor design effort.
Whether this A7 is really as good as the most positive reviews of it seem to make it, or it's just being blown way out of proportion due to excitement, I'm glad Apple decided to play this game. Making a chip that won't immediately be embarrassed by anything from Intel requires a lot of money and dedication. Apple is one of the few companies that have both in spades.
Realistically, AMD has no hope of catching up in any material way to Intel (again, it's really just a matter of R&D budgets), so they'll always be relegated to "cheaper second-source" or gain a few niche markets using their GPU tech as leverage. But that's that, and no more than that. A real Xeon competitor? Nope. Desktop competitor? Nope. Laptop / mobile? Still nothing. There is nothing they are doing (other than their integrated GPU tech) that Intel cannot do much better. And because of the reality of the available R&D budgets for both companies, there is simply no way they will magically catch up.
For Apple, the cards are completely different. They are literally sitting on over a hundred billion dollars, and have a very loyal, very dedicated user base. AMD's problem of limited cash is not going to be a problem for Apple in the next 6 years
even if they decided to stop selling products now (based on a ~$20B 12-month total operating expenses; I sort of remember an ~$18B figure some time ago, just rounded up from there).
I don't even own any Apple product (I do have 3 Android devices of wildly different quality and sizes), so it's kind of funny to me that I'm writing what seems like a very pro-Apple piece. I'm not really so much as supporting Apple, I'm just more excited at the possibility that a really serious competitor in the CPU area might be getting born before our very eyes. I love Intel, they have awesome products, but it won't break my heart if another cash-rich corp decided they want to play the game too for whatever purpose, instead of just having "competitors" who can't afford anything close to what Intel spends annually for R&D.
I don't have data at hand, so I can't comment on how profitable the CPU designing venture is for Apple (honestly, I don't even understand right now why they bothered, but then again I don't really follow Apple). I hope it's very profitable, so they'd have the inclination to continue and maybe even expand their efforts.
Do I still have time for an analogy? I promise it won't be a car analogy (I know even less about cars than I do about Apple products). I'm going to use boxing.
Intel vs AMD is like a boxing match between Mayweather (Intel) vs an amateur boxer (AMD). I simply see no outcome that isn't an event that Mayweather dictated himself (be it a quick finish or a drawn out fight for show).
But Intel vs Apple? Now that's more like Mayweather vs Pacquiao. Fair fight, big names, no doubt a decent and exciting match - if only Pacman decided he wanted to play.