Henry there are a few small players working on faster arm for server market, but not sure there’s anyone Microsoft can buy that would get them to where Apple is now in maybe 3 years. I’m no Apple fanboy (Android and Mac OS, Windows, Chromebook everyday and iPad for Roon/Poker 
) but Apple has done a fantastic job, but it will all stay in house and they will be off in the distance in the next two years.
Regards
Mike
It’s not just money you need to do what Apple has done. You need the right people, the right partnerships, and the right experience as well. Microsoft’s dabbling in hardware has not done much to set them up to make their own cutting edge ARM-based SoCs. They are essentially starting from scratch compared to where Apple is now. Apple, on the other hand, are just beginning to show what is in their vast Apple Silicon SoC pipeline.
If you talk to anyone in the SoC industry, they will tell that what Apple has been able to do is shocking. I have friends at Intel and they were caught completely off guard by the M1. They thought something like that was years away from reality.
Not really, my servers aren’t battery powered. A couple extra watts in my world doesn’t matter at-all. I need the heat in my basement anyway and the only difference is heating with electricity vs heating with propane.
Sheldon
Sheldon I might have added, besides people warming their basements 
That was a whole class of users I absentmindedly left out of my calculation!!
Mike
But the cat is out of the bag now. Others will try and catch up. There are plenty of companies with silicon design chops on a par with Apple and several with at least as much resource at their disposal.
This isn’t a “Why didn’t I think of that!” situation where some company can just go out an copy what has been done. Just about anyone that needs to catch up is starting in a big hole. The first company that needs to catch up is Intel and they have nothing. They are losing Apple’s CPU business forever. They need to do something to keep their CPUs relevant for the future. They have the Windows PC world for now but could be at risk from Microsoft if they succeed (big “if” based on their history with hardware) and AMD. Intel still hasn’t managed 7nm while Apple and AMD are at 5nm because of TMSC.
The “cat is out of the bag” for a long time now on the mobile side and no one has caught up to Apple or even really managed to close the gap.
Who has as much resources at their disposal than Apple? To catch Apple, you are going to need more resources, smarter people, better partnerships, and time. I don’t see anyone with more resources, smarter people, better partnerships, or more time…
MS and Amazon both have at least as much resource as Apple and are both working in the ARM area.
I didn’t say they would necessarily catch up quickly or even at all, but I do think they will be working to try. They can certainly leverage their own benefits from similar product designs and some may be more open than Apple’s platform in relation to Roon OS etc.
Amazon has the resources but does not need to keep up as they do not compete with Apple or for Apple’s business. Amazon only cares about their servers utilized by their proprietary services.
Microsoft has no where near the resources Apple has. To get where Apple is now with Apple Silicon SoC, Microsoft will need to spend massive amounts of money, hire a lot people with very specific skill sets, and spend at least 3 years doing it. On top of that, that need to build an emulator to be compatible with the Intel world. If Microsoft were to want to run apps native on their ARM SoC, they would need to get the rest of Windows developer and customer base to buy into abandoning Intel. Too many obstacles…
And yet they are both doing it, despite Apple being unassailable masters of the universe.
Are they?
Amazon’s Graviton SoC is an Amazon cloud server product. Will they ever make a commercially available? Who knows. All I know is that the Amazon Graviton is a problem for Microsoft’s Azure business and for Intel and AMD cloud server business. It’s not a problem for Apple.
Microsoft appears to be more focused on Azure server SoCs than Intel replacements for laptop and desktop systems.
Apple are not the masters of the universe. They just happen to have a huge lead will be difficult to catch in the next five years based on that lead and the obvious commitment to expand their offerings.
They are server focussed at the moment but if the results of that effort are good there is no reason why MS at least wouldn’t redirect effort to the desktop. Not to mention the likes of Qualcomm etc. There is plenty of scope for much faster arm socs in the not too distant future and maybe we will get Roon OS on one of them.
No Apple are not the masters of the universe they have considerably less than 20% of the desktop/laptop market so however good these M1 chips are they won’t have a huge audience.
I am not suprised by Apple doing this - given some of the crazy benchmarks people have posted of their iPhone (X or XS onwards) doing things like javascript benchmarks on par with a well spec’d PC - it seemed obvious for a while they had the means to make a bit of a leap to the extent that some dev I worked with were wondering why they hadnt a coupe of years ago and yet people at intel etc surprised today? Sure - there is more to a PC than whatever bit of an iPhone was providing such a perf boost to this particular scenario, but still - it was very impressive at the time when a phone is aggressively nipping at the tail of a decent PC.
As I understand apple have been working for many years trying to harmonise the OSX and iOS platforms, so my guess is this has been in the pipeline for a very long time with iphones being the platforms that were serving as the test beds for parts of it along with other bits that had escaped from iphones into their laptops over some of the recent annual revisions.
As for intel, I would not be surprised if they have long been in cahoots with MS to get back into licensing arm cores again. They did the strongarm in the past (well they bought it from DEC), so I could imagine them bringing a bit of brute force and ignorance to the party. ARM-PCs already exist. They are just not worth writing home about right now, but I could see that changing once MS create the demand by having their entire OS and app stack fully arm ready and get all their major hardware partners lined up, but I would guess that is a couple of years away.
As for server arms, well I dont see them having any impact at all on desktop arms. Its a different proposal - bundle a load of cheap low power and low thermal profile cores onto a die so you can stuff as many as possible into a server so those server end up being very efficient at running very high volume light weight tasks - perfect for the server end of IoT. When running 000s of servers, then power and cooling costs soon mount up as on going operating costs which everyone hates.
Probably not so great in a desktop machine that also needs a bit of brute force too.
Ok. Apple was just about out of business when they introduced the iPhone. Look where they are now. They have the best mobile platform by far. If I were you and Microsoft, I wouldn’t be discounting where Apple could be in 5 years.
When all Apple had was, at best, CPU parity with Windows-based machines there was no compelling reason besides UI for companies to switch software/hardware platforms. If Apple gains a significant performance advantage over Intel-based systems, who knows what might happen.
They were almost out of business when they introduced the iMac (gumdrop model). They were doing well when they introduced the iPhone. They had the iMac line and OsX and dominated with personal music player market (it was a complete ass beating in the mp3 player world).
A bit of a random off-topic post here:
I have my iPad Air 4th Gen (256gb, A14 SoC) hooked up to 27" display and 2 x powered USB 3.0 hubs with all sorts of things hanging off like HQPlayer server featuring USB input… USB to ethernet adapter, mouse, keyboard, USB DAC, printer, USB to TOSlink converter and a few other little things).
I can’t believe how zippy it feels.
It legit feels zippier than my 2020 Macbook Air (10th Gen i5) but the real kicker is the iPad doesn’t feature the vacuum cleaner sounding fan noise of the i5 Macbook Air when I push it with a lot of tasks.
Got the M1 Mac Mini coming soon.
Wow - well the A14 was the basis for the M1 chip.
Any plans to swap the MacBook Air for an M1 powered version?
I do think Apple has a game-changer in the M1 both for the new fanless Air and MBP.
Plus given the overall rate of CPU/GPU development, it has been able to sustain with its own SoC architecture in the iPhone and iPad.
The MacBook Air M1 has the agility en speed of an iPad in macOS/MacBook clothing. It is a gamechanging laptop: true, full day battery, lightning fast, 100% quiet and cool as a cucumber. It is everything you could wish for in a laptop.
That said – my daily driver is an iPad Pro 12,9. I have used both machines next to another for a week or two, only to find the Air gathering dust in the end. I just prefer iOS/iPadOS for most tasks – even if that means learning to live with a few warts. That – and I dislike the amount of window management macOS requires.
So, it ended up with my wife. She’s ecstatically happy with it – not in the least with having a fully quiet machine during Zoom/Meet/Teams/whatever calls that have become a large part of our working days. 10 minutes in, her last-gen Intel MBA sounded like the love-child of a helicopter and a vacuum cleaner.
Yet I couldn’t help myself getting an M1 Mac mini over Christmas, hidden away in the storage room, running Roon server, Time Machine backups and few Linux VMs. With Luna display, it’s like macOS-as-an-app-on-the-iPad. 
No the plan was to replace the vacuum cleaner noise machine (MacBook 2020 i5) with Mac Mini M1 (for home) + A14 iPad Air 256gb Gen4 (for mobile).
The Mac Mini M1 is coming but so far the iPad Air is really handling everything I throw at it. I could easily leave this as my home + mobile solution.
I’m typing this in Safari and in the background Tidal iOS is playing (bit perfectly) to my USB connected HQPlayer OS machine (USB in and USB out) which feeds my RME ADI-2 FS DAC. Same can be done with Apple Music and Spotify and Souncloud etc …
If I need to watch video (lip sync is important) I by-pass HQPlayer and instead there is a USB to TOSlink converter connected to the iPad and TOSlink feeds the RME ADI-2 DAC also.
There’s literally only 3 things I can’t do with the iPad Air, that the Mac Mini M1 (or any macOS machine) would do for me but for everything else it’s killer (for me).
iPadOS will only get better with more features too.
So so zippy.
And in the top right of my 27" inch screen as I type this in Safari, there is 1080p Full HD PIP (picture in picture) of a replay of today’s basketball game.
The game is on mute so that Tidal iOS app (or Apple Music or Spotify) can still play in the background exclusively.
Not a stutter, and no annoying fan noise like before.
Just to clarify - there are people that have shown the A14 can do way more intense stuff than I’ve described… so I’m not a source of breaking news.
I was just sharing how I’m shocked at what it can do, for the stuff that I do.
I just wish the aspect ratios with external displays can get sorted in a future iOS update.
Another thread that never dies. I know it’s a matter of religion (almost) at Roon about ARM for Roon Server, but I find it hard to believe that current, competent ARM platforms can’t run ROON. Anyone who has used the A72-based Graviton cores at AWS, or the Ampere-based N1 cores would laugh if they were told that a Celeron or i5 could do more than one of those systems.
There are SOCs and SOMs out there that pack 8-16 A72 or A74 cores into one package for < $700. These can run a NASs, handle 100Gbps of line-rate encryption, etc. I seriously doubt that they couldn’t handle Roon Server.
Yes, someone could run Roon Server on a RPi and have a bad day, but guess what, I could grab a crufty old Celeron and have the same experience. Assume your users have some brain cells, pls.
A 16 A72 core, 32-64GB mITX home server with 4x10/25GE can be had for reasonable money and makes one hell of a home server…