I learned so much about the history of chip production from this interview. Some interesting things I didn’t know:
- CISC vs RISC. In hindsight, it’s obvious that a reduced instruction set is more ideal for devices sensitive to power efficiency. What’s less obvious is that manufacturers like Apple would have enough demand from mobile device sales to warrant specializing on one instruction set across even their desktop products.
- Apple used ARM for the iPod. A very clever person could have made a case then that the future would be RISC.
- Amazon uses ARM in the datacenter[^1]. At one point, they accounted for half of all sales.