They have a good silicon design team, but having so much money that they can just buy out exclusive access to TSMCs most advanced processes doesn't hurt either. The closest ARM competitor to the M4, the Snapdragon X Elite, is a full node behind on 4nm while Apple is already using 2nd generation 3nm.
So then it should be comparable to the M1 or M2? Which isn't bad at all, if true.
But is it, for the same power consumption?
For some benchmarks the Snapdragon is on par with the M3. But the weirdo tests I found online did not say which device they compared, since the M3 is available in fan-less machines, which limits its potential.
Outside of Ampere(who are really more server focused) who else is designing desktop/laptop ARM cpus?
That’s a really fair point. I think it’s tough for anyone else to break into the consumer / desktop segment with ARM chips. Apple can do it because they control the whole stack.
Qualcomm and Nvidia.
NVIDIA don’t have custom cores
What if I told you they don't need them.
What if I told you that the rest of the context was about custom cores.
They also have the advantage that they could break software compatibility with the M1, e.g. using 16 kB pages and 128 byte cache blocks.
They do mixed page mode depending on the program running.