Some of you probably know that smartphone chips differ from computer chips in one very important way: architecture. Mobile chips use the ARM architecture while our laptop, PCs and Macs use the x86. We won’t bore you with the technical details, just wanted to point out how important it is when Arm, the company that owns the IP behind the ARM architecture, releases new chip designs.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips and Apple’s A-series chips have different structures and performance but they’re all based on Arm’s designs. Companies license the designs and make their own tweaks and combine different ...