> I am wondering if any of the windows / linux laptop makers will follow suit?
The article was actually spot-on in giving a reason why this won't be the case: AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA aren't going to license any of their IP to the likes of Dell, HP, MSI, Toshiba, Lenovo, TongFeng or ASUS.
Only NVIDIA and Qualcomm are left in the ARM SoC market (in terms of proprietary chip designs) since Samsung shut down their custom CPU design department end of last year. Neither of the two is competitive in terms of performance with Apple's custom chips and their SoCs are OK for SBCs, tablets, and Chromebook-level hardware but in no way competitive with even mid-range offerings from AMD and Intel.
Another factor is vendor lock-in. Since M1-style ARM-based SoCs wouldn't allow for discrete GPUs and RAM upgrades, creating a carefully segmented range of SKUs would be next to impossible. Even Apple struggles to do so as seen by the virtually non-existent differentiation between the M1 Macbook Air and -Pro.
AMD- and Intel-based systems allow OEMs to create bespoke product lines for each target market: NVIDIA Quadros and 32+GB of RAM for CAD/CAM and design work, powerful systems for gamers, CPUs with "pro"-features for businesses, etc.
An SoC is the same for all products. Sure, you can do some minimal differentiation by disabling a core or two, binning and cooling, but in the end there's very little practical difference between an SoC with 7 or 8 GPU cores... I'm pretty sure the MBA will cannibalise sales of the MBP big time for this exact reason.
The article was actually spot-on in giving a reason why this won't be the case: AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA aren't going to license any of their IP to the likes of Dell, HP, MSI, Toshiba, Lenovo, TongFeng or ASUS.
Only NVIDIA and Qualcomm are left in the ARM SoC market (in terms of proprietary chip designs) since Samsung shut down their custom CPU design department end of last year. Neither of the two is competitive in terms of performance with Apple's custom chips and their SoCs are OK for SBCs, tablets, and Chromebook-level hardware but in no way competitive with even mid-range offerings from AMD and Intel.
Another factor is vendor lock-in. Since M1-style ARM-based SoCs wouldn't allow for discrete GPUs and RAM upgrades, creating a carefully segmented range of SKUs would be next to impossible. Even Apple struggles to do so as seen by the virtually non-existent differentiation between the M1 Macbook Air and -Pro.
AMD- and Intel-based systems allow OEMs to create bespoke product lines for each target market: NVIDIA Quadros and 32+GB of RAM for CAD/CAM and design work, powerful systems for gamers, CPUs with "pro"-features for businesses, etc.
An SoC is the same for all products. Sure, you can do some minimal differentiation by disabling a core or two, binning and cooling, but in the end there's very little practical difference between an SoC with 7 or 8 GPU cores... I'm pretty sure the MBA will cannibalise sales of the MBP big time for this exact reason.