> I bet they'd make a completely custom ISA if they could. Heck, maybe they plan to some day, and that's why they're calling the new Mac processors "Apple Silicon".

That was my first thought.

I'd be surprised if Apple wasn't already working on this.

I could see apple being the next in line of basically failed VLIW ISAs - the cost/benefit doesn't really add up to completely redesign, prove, implement, and support a new ISA unless it was worth it technologically.

If they could pull it off I would be very impressed.

Thinking about that though, from a technical perspective keeping the name but changing the function would only produce bad PR.

- "We changed from the 68K to PPC" "Agh!...fine"

- "We changed from PPC to x86" "What, again?"

- "We changed from x86 to Apple Silicon" "...oooo...kay..."

- "We changed from Apple Silicon to, uh, Apple Silicon - like it's still called Apple Silicon, but the architecture is different" "What's an architecture?" "The CPU ISA." "The CPU is a what?"