"How Apple achieved these gains is an interesting business and technical story. In 2008, about a year after Apple released the first iPhone, it purchased a small semiconductor start-up to build specialized chips for its phones. For many years, Intel’s chips were made primarily for stationary machines like servers and personal computers. To hit their top speeds, Intel’s processors had to draw a lot of electricity and created a lot of heat. But Apple’s most important products are mobile, powered by batteries, so chugging a lot of power wasn’t ideal. Its chip designers had to take a starkly different approach. Rather than maximize raw power, Apple aimed to build chips that were optimized for power and efficiency.
The technical ways Apple has achieved this combination will sound like geeky gobbledygook to anyone unschooled in semiconductor theory. Broadly, though, Apple’s systems use a lot of specialized processing units and are optimized to run more operations “out of order,” a technical term that basically means they can execute more code simultaneously.
The result is something like the difference between a muscle car and a Tesla. The muscle car achieves high speeds with a huge engine that burns a lot of gasoline. The Tesla can hit even higher speeds while consuming less power because its electric motor is inherently more efficient than a gas engine. For years, Intel was making muscle cars; Apple’s big innovation was to build the Tesla of computer chips."
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