I don&#x27;t know if outdated &quot;RISC vs. CISC&quot; thinking is what motivated Gruber&#x27;s statement, but I think there are much more convincing ways to justify it.<p>If I could change Gruber&#x27;s statement, I would say that &quot;The future belongs to <i>custom-designed SoCs</i>&quot;<p>The advantages that Apple derives from the A-series SoCs is not due to any inherent advantage of ARM vs. x86, but because Apple has full control over the design and manufacturing.<p>- Apple can design an SoC for a specific product given the manufacturing process available at the time: see last year&#x27;s one-off 3-core A8X, because adding a 3rd core was a better tradeoff than increasing clocks. This year, the A9X is back to 2 cores but much higher clocked than the A9.<p>- Apple gains a competitive advantage by building processors only for themselves, and can catch the rest of the industry off guard (see: ARMv8 A7). They also get to follow their own principles (two fast, wide cores) rather than being forced into everyone else&#x27;s marketing hype (8 heterogeneous, slower cores)<p>- If Apple wants a stronger GPU they can just license it from PowerVR, rather than having to lobby Intel and hope the resulting silicon is better (or worse, having to add an external GPU)<p>- Apple can even hedge its bets w.r.t fab processes: see the dual-sourced TSMC&#x2F;Samsung A9<p>ARM is a threat to x86 because anyone can design&#x2F;buy an ARM core, design an SoC around it, and manufacture it anywhere they want. Intel&#x2F;AMD can&#x27;t come close to that flexibility, and on platforms where Win32&#x2F;Intel binary compatibility is irrelevant, x86 will decline&#x2F;stay irrelevant.