Apple hasn't shipped their "desktop class" architecture yet.

Perhaps you are frustrated by the design constraints of low power mobile chips. Ok.

But if you're paying attention, architecture wise, it may be of interest to note that Apple's ARM chips, so far, have delivered good performance in their handheld applications by careful attention to sustained memory bandwidth. Competitors went with more CPU cores.

So there's some fun chip architecture to be had, even in 2020.

A desktop Apple architecture might use something like HBM for main memory, rather than DIMMs.

There's lots of room to innovate, out there in consumer computing.

Last time I checked, Z had 500gb/sec; more than 10x Apple's. Kind of wish IBM had won processor wars. Generally speaking whenever I look at their mainframe doodads, then look at the hot garbage being slung over at Amazon or whatever FAANG shit hole, it makes me sad. The company with the best engineers is an also-ran that mostly sells consultant hours. Maybe they'll sell off the mainframe business independent of the rest of the horse shit and it will undergo a renaissance. Doubt it though.

IBM has been building chips since day one. I'd expect IBM to divest their mainframe business eventually. The distinction you are missing is that usually "finance-driven" companies don't usually decide to pour billions of dollars into bringing in an already outsourced component in house that they hardly have experience in.

Furthermore, I don't see IBM using the Z to "innovate" - They aren't pushing the mainframes to anyone other than people who are already buying mainframes.

>Z is a more interesting architecture by far than the turd Apple is shipping.

The Z, an architecture for people who are pretty much already buying mainframes, is more interesting than a desktop class chip with what will probably be a completely unmatched in performance/watt? I don't see how the Z is more interesting than a chip that is finally attempting to challenge the 30 year x86 dominance in desktop computing.