Re: Apple was involved in the design/spec of ARMv8
They didn't know Apple would be ready to ship phones containing an ARMv8 CPU that soon, but they knew Apple was working on it. No one can go from clean sheet to shipping CPUs in 23 months, Apple obviously had access to the ARMv8 ISA well before its public release. Apple already received their first samples of the A14 from TSMC, which will ship in iPhones next year, a month ago. It takes over three years at the absolute minimum from clean sheet to shipping in phones.
There is a fair amount of collaboration between ARM and its architectural licensees on the design of the ISAs (see above for a guy involved in this with ARM & ST) because they want to serve the needs of their customer base to be successful.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
