LOL! It gets even MORE ridiculous: I was biting my tongue to keep myself from calling out your strawman only to see you turn around and throw that same word at me.
Ever see the guy with notoriously “stank breaf” tell someone else “yo breaf stanks” when he gets mad? Yeah: there’s a reason for that.
Strawman: an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument
This started when Denly asked...
...and CatMerc answered:
I *correctly* responded to say that there is no reason why adding a bunch of I/O, like USB and PCIe would be any more costly for A12 with an external chip than it would be on an X86 chip with an external chip, because X86 still adds them via an external bus (DMI for the latest Intel CPUs). They would BOTH make up for the lack of general I/O with external devices on the rest of the board while retaining their inherent performance and efficiency advantages/disadvantages for their comparable functionality at a given performance level.
...then you show up with some baseless and irrelevant distinction (“SOC”) which you use to try and dismiss the truth I just told you:
*facepalm*
“The functionality mentioned” was, and I quote, “6 SATA, 6-10 USBs, 2-3 screens and a few PCIe.” For X86, this I/O is all on the motherboard chipset:
...not the SOC. The rest of your posturing about “strawman” this and “strawman” boils down to you using “SOC” to refer to the X86 CPU only where I more logically assumed you were talking about Apple’s chip.
About the only place where you might think you have a point is where the latest X86 CPUs would have PCIe lanes for graphics without going through the chipset, which is irrelevant for a theoretical A12 successor-based iMac or MacBook that is relying on the integrated GPU specifically to maintain an efficiency advantage (power to performance). Considering that their current GPUs already outclass any other iGPUs, they could easily integrate a GPU with enough performance for “2-3 screens.” That isn’t a big consideration for selling iMacs and MacBooks but, who knows? Maybe it will be for future iMac Pros or something.
I think it’s weird that you specifically try to distinguish X86 CPUs as SOCs when, traditionally, ARM-based SOC have been significantly more highly integrated. Heck, some even throw RAM into the package. If anything, an Apple SOC that rivals X86 for future iMac and MacBooks would likely be even more highly integrated than a similar-performing X86 system.