China’s per capita GDP is a mediocre $15,399, while Taiwan’s per capita GDP is $48,095. China is only ranked 110th on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, whereas Taiwan finds itself in an envious 13th place. China’s per capita GDP is a mediocre $15,399, while Taiwan’s per capita GDP is $48,095.

China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, accounting for 24.3 percent of total trade and 20.1 percent of Taiwan’s imports in 2019. In terms of total trade, other major Taiwan trading partners include Japan (10.9 percent), the European Union (9.7 percent), and Hong Kong (6.7 percent).

$1.3 trillion

TAIWAN: MAJOR INDUSTRIES The major industries in Taiwan are electronics, petroleum refining, armaments, chemicals, textiles, iron and steel, machinery, cement, food processing, vehicles, consumer products, pharmaceuticals.

Economy of Taiwan

Taiwanese companies are known for good quality, reliable production lead-times, fair prices, and good business practices. A lot of trust is required to ask another company to do both design and manufacturing. Developing a new product often takes more than a year of effort and a high budget.

United Kingdom is approximately 243,610 sq km, while Taiwan is approximately 35,980 sq km, making Taiwan 14.77% the size of United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the population of United Kingdom is ~65.8 million people (42.2 million fewer people live in Taiwan).

Hon Hai Precision Industry

Services. The service sector of Taiwan’s economy is now its most dynamic and fastest growing, accounting for some two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product (GDP).

Morris Chang

Obviously, going after the world’s second-biggest economy wasn’t exactly great for the bottom line. Still, one exception to this assumed narrative could be Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM). Judging from its year-to-date performance, TSM stock is loving the tensions between the two.

Taiwan (traditional Chinese: 臺灣/台灣; simplified Chinese: 台湾; pinyin: Táiwān), officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. Neighbouring countries include the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast, and the Philippines to the south.

Intel famously controls its own factories, called “fabs,” around the world, compared to Apple, which contracts with companies in Asia to manufacture chips to its own specifications. But Apple’s chip manufacturing partner, TSMC, can make 5-nanometer chips while Intel can’t.

Apple has always needed to develop its own modem. After all, it has always designed its own processors for the iPhone and iPad, allowing it to optimize them for its own devices, thus having a performance-related competitive edge over Android, which typically incorporates Qualcomm chips.

C. C. Wei (Nov 12, 2013–)

That includes Apple. Nearly all of Apple’s products now contain Arm-compatible CPUs. The iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and HomePod all feature processors that run the Arm instruction set.

When Softbank acquired ARM, it promised to keep the company’s headquarters in the UK and to increase the number of local jobs, which it did. Softbank’s founder Masayoshi Son described the firm as being a “crystal ball” that would help him predict where tech was heading.

Arm is a big deal because it has captured more than a 90% share in the mobile market. That is, almost all mobile phones today are based on Arm’s architecture. Whether it’s a Samsung, Huawei or iPhone, at the most basic level, they have the same origin.

In this uncertain business environment, Nvidia announced last September that it reached a deal with Softbank to acquire U.K. based semiconductor and software design company Arm Ltd. for $40 billion, making it one of the biggest acquisitions in tech.

SoftBank Group

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced an investigation into a $40bn (£29.5bn) takeover of UK computer chip designer Arm Holdings. US graphics chip specialist Nvidia agreed the deal to buy the company from Japan’s Softbank Group in September last year.

The ARM abbreviation for the processor design stands for Acorn RISC Machine, and the ARM abbreviation for the company that designs and sells the license to use that architecture stands for Advanced RISC Machines.

x86/x64 processors: They’re fast and powerful, but they require a lot of electricity. So, they’re used in desktop computers that can plug into the wall. All versions of Windows run on x86/x64. ARM processors: They’re weak but low-power processors for smartphones and other devices that aren’t plugged into the wall.

Arm is RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based while Intel (x86) is CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing). This leads to better performance, but more power consumption decoding these complex instructions. This link between instructions and processor hardware design is what makes a CPU architecture.

Apple’s custom chips are Arm-based and are similar to the A-series chips used in iPhones and iPads, and Apple unveiled the first Apple Silicon Macs in November.

If you buy an Apple device it’s going to have a (custom) Intel processor coming from the same generation as its competitors. Despite ARM being just around the river bend, there’s never really been a better time to buy an Apple laptop or desktop. And no, you probably shouldn’t wait for those first few ARM Apple devices.

Apple seems confident in the future performance of its Arm-based Macs. It’s worth noting, however, that the Arm-powered 2019 ‌iPad Pro‌ running Arm-native benchmarking software is faster than the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2019) in single core and multi-core benchmarks.

Though it’s possible that, spec-wise, the ARM chip would be less powerful than the Intel processor, like most things Apple, it’s highly unlikely that it would release any machine that didn’t perform better than its Intel counterpart.