Arm Macs and AMD rising: How Intel’s endless 10nm struggles cost it so much

Intel’s endless 10nm nightmare has cost it so, so much.

It all started on September 5, 2014. That’s the day Intel introduced 5th-gen Core M chips based on “Broadwell”, the company’s first processors built using the 14-nanometer manufacturing process. Despite some manufacturing woes that pushed Broadwell back from its expected 2013 release, Intel’s offering served as the vanguard of processor technology. AMD remained stuck on the 28nm process with its abysmal Bulldozer architecture. A mere month later, the Apple iPad Air 2 launched with a custom A8X chip that couldn’t quite hang with Intel’s older Haswell CPUs in Geekbench—but it was getting close.

Nearly six years later, the tables have turned. Intel’s 10th-gen Core processors remain on an (upgraded) 14nm process. AMD’s Ryzen chips have snatched the, and Apple’s doing the unthinkable: switching Macs away from x86 CPUs onto its own custom Arm silicon. And if Apple’s flight from Nvidia GPUs after “” in 2009 is any indication, it won’t be coming back.