Definition of commodity: A reasonably interchangeable good or material, bought and sold freely as an article of commerce.
That's just one, but none of the other definitions I can find suggest any type of IP ownership or licensing model. Don't get me wrong, what ARM did was a great thing. I just think what's happening around RISC-V is even better.
Apple refuses to sell their designs on the commodity market, so they can basically be ignored as a CPU/SoC vendor. Also, for what it's worth, Apple's CPU designs are not strictly "better" than the competition, they really just have a different target. Other vendors have more focus on dynamic and idle power, Apple seems to care a lot about single-core top line throughput.
That said, if you look at the way applications for Watch OS are submitted, you'll note that the submission format is LLVM bitcode, not machine code. This seems like an obvious and direct statement that they are willing to drop ARM at any moment for the Apple Watch. Something similar could (probably) be done for iOS.
> Other vendors have more focus on dynamic and idle power, Apple seems to care a lot about single-core top line throughput.
If that's true, it's actually more embarrassing for the other vendors, since iPhones get comparable battery life to Android phones with batteries half the size.
Apples and oranges. The Apple phones get better battery life because of stricter app store inclusion rules and native binary builds for all targets instead of generic automated ports.
Plus the rest of the materials BoM on the phones probably cherry picks parts that are very efficient and tuned to work well with each other.
Why aren't Androids in this same boat? My guess is that it's because Samsung wants to release 10 different Galaxy phones a year to have something new and shiny in every product segment instead of focusing on one REALLY polished design and leaving last year's model for their mid/low end.
> Apple phones get better battery life because of stricter app store inclusion rules and native binary builds for all targets instead of generic automated ports.
Apple does just as well in comparisons that only measure the first party browser.
Apple wins in battery life because they sell $900+ phones and invest large sums in engineering specialized chips while Qualcomm doesn't sell phones, they sell chips to customers whose main concern is price.
Not really. You'd have to go through the same motions. Either way it'd end up looking like later versions of MACRO-11 which treated PDP-11 assembly as a full language to be compiled for other architectures rather than just an assembler.
