

Apple Reportedly Looking To Move From Intel To ARM Processors (Very unlikely?) - EwanToo
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/05/06/apple-reportedly-looking-to-move-from-intel-to-arm-processors/

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Construct
It seems very unlikely to me that they'd switch the MacBook line to ARM and
rely on an emulation layer to run current applications. ARM processors are
getting faster all of time, but catching up to full Intel CPUs is going to be
a very difficult task.

Meanwhile, Apple would have to support ARM-based MacBooks and Intel-based
workstations until ARM became fast enough to replace workstation-level
processors. While software makers caught up to the new architecture, MacBooks
would lose much of their 'desktop replacement' status unless they truly could
emulate x86 and x64 code with impressive speed.

I really doubt that Apple would split the architectures of their laptop and
desktop lines.

~~~
nextparadigms
If Microsoft can move to ARM, so can Apple. ARM chips don't have to beat
Intel's most powerful chips from the start. They just need to get good enough
for a Macbook Air, and then transition them to the other notebooks once they
become more powerful over the coming years.

~~~
ecuzzillo
A key selling point of the Air is that it is a full-fledged Mac computer. If
it has to run normal Mac applications in an emulation layer, which will
undoubtedly be slow because the Air's processor is not powerful, this will not
be true.

------
demallien
At first look, there would appear to be two substantial roadblocks to this
happening. The first is simply performance. For computers (as opposed to
iPads) performance is king, and Intel is the undisputed champion of
performance, at least at the moment. We would need to see substantial advances
in performance by ARM manufacturers that we just aren't seeing yet - maybe
NVidia has the capacity to make it happen?

The second problem is that trying to take an application that runs on a
powerful Intel chip, and then emulate the Intel instruction set on an ARM chip
would be just diabolically slow. Apple have already changed the processor
family twice for the Mac (68000->PowerPC, PowerPC->Intel), but in both cases
the new architecture was substantially more powerful than the predecessor.
That is not the case with a transition from Intel to ARM.

Of course, this time around there is a potential game-changer, the Mac App
Store. Applications built for the App Store are at least in theory very easy
to rebuild for another CPU architecture, and then push to users. You have an
app bought for your Intel Mac, you "upgrade" to an ARM Mac, and the App Store
automatically grabs the ARM version of your software for you.

Still, the two problems are showstoppers, each in its own right. Power has to
improve substantially, and the Mac App Store needs to cement itself as _the_
way to distribute software on the Mac before any such transition could be
envisaged. Which is not to say that Apple doesn't already have a build of Mac
OSX running on an ARM motherboard - indeed I would think it likely that they
do have such a beast in the lab - but its purpose would be more as a
bargaining chip with Intel, and as an interesting future direction, rather
than as an actual product.

~~~
protomyth
> Performance is king

Not so much for laptops. Given the existence and usage of the Atom, there are
plenty of people that would be fine with battery life, heat, and weight
changes that could be brought by the ARM. If the Macbook / Macbook Air
switched to ARM (I would guess an A-15 Cortex), then they would fit in fine
and app developers would get their software recompiled. Heck, cross platform
developers need to be ready for W8 on ARM.

~~~
demallien
I don't think that Apple see the world that way. If I'm reading the Steve Jobs
tealeaves correctly, from Apple's perspective anyone that is happy with an
Atom-based laptop today is tomorrow's iPad user, and Macs are going to be
reserved for those cases where you really need some power under the hood.

~~~
protomyth
I get the point, but am not sure I 100% agree. I think your dead on about the
"Pro" line, but I can see the non-pro laptops going ARM. The customization
ability might be the key.

------
jamaicahest
Please don't change the title of the article when submitting it, to argue your
point. Make a comment instead.

------
melling
We can't be more than a few years away from the iPad or iPhone becoming a full
computer. Slide it next to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and it transforms
into a desktop.

~~~
zyb09
Not unless they significantly open up iOS.

~~~
mambodog
Your definition of what constitutes a "full computer" may differ greatly from
that of a regular, non-technical user.

~~~
tomjen3
Can you run skype in the background while browsing a website in iOS?

If not, it isn't really a real computer.

~~~
refulgentis
Not sure you were asking seriously, but yes, since July of last year.
[http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/07/iphone_multitasking_3g.htm...](http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/07/iphone_multitasking_3g.html)

~~~
tomjen3
Okay that surprised me, I assumed it was only allowed for music playing.

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nextparadigms
I think it's more likely Apple moves to ARM for Macs than moving from ARM to
Intel chips for iPhones and iPads, like it was rumored a few days ago. ARM
chips will be powerful enough for Apple notebooks in a couple of years, so I
could definitely see an ARM chip in a future Macbook Air sometime in the next
2 years.

~~~
microarchitect
As you say, it's quite possible.

Some competitive studies that a professional acquaintance of mine did
indicated that if the ARM Cortex A15 meets it's performance goals, it would
roughly have IPC [1] parity with AMD's Bobcat. Bobcat is now at 1.6 GHz and
the Cortex A15 is being designed for 2.5 GHz. This means that the A15 might be
up to 10-20% faster than Bobcat. Now, Bobcat is at approximately about 50-60%
performance of a high-end notebook today, which leaves the A15 looking very
decent performance wise.

I think the real threat to the Cortex comes from the 22nm Atom. If the 30%
power savings due to the FinFETs are true [2], taking into account the fact
that the current-generation Atoms are still on 45nm, it's conceivable that
Atom power consumption might reduce by something like 70%. Also note that the
A15 will still be on either 28nm or 32nm, so due to Intel's manufacturing
muscle means the Atom part will be very competitive.

Things are beginning to get interesting in the microprocessor industry. :-)

[1] IPC: Instructions per clock cycle. [2] I'm not a circuits guy but my semi-
informed guess is that the numbers are not far from reality.

~~~
nextparadigms
It will take a while for Intel to move Atom to 22nm. They are just moving it
to 32nm next year. Normally, that means they would switch to 22nm in 2014, but
if they are in a real hurry they'll do it in 2013. But I'm not seeing them
doing it any faster than that. Two years is quite a lot of time in the mobile
industry. It might be way too late for Intel, then.

Plus, they'll only be able to get close with something like a single core
Atom, like they are trying this year. We'll have quad core Cortex A15 chips by
then, which means even if Atom catches up in energy efficiency, the ARM chips
will be significantly more powerful by then - all at the same price or cheaper
than Intel's Atom. So I don't see much incentive for manufacturers to use it.

~~~
microarchitect
Don't forget the A15 is also at least a year away.

I'm not sure what you mean by this: "Plus, they'll only be able to get close
with something like a single core Atom, like they are trying this year."

> We'll have quad core Cortex A15 chips by then.

I don't think this is a big deal. Intel already have dual-core Atoms which
actually have 4 threads, which are going to be quite competitive out of the
box with a quad core ARM chip.

> all at the same price or cheaper than Intel's Atom.

I don't buy this. Intel's fabs can blow the pants off everyone else in terms
of yield and cost. The big pile of cash they're sitting will also help.

> Two years is quite a lot of time in the mobile industry

This might be true, but my points were specifically made for laptops and not
mobile phone chips.

~~~
nextparadigms
Intel's dual core chips have a 10W power draw. If they moved it today to the
22nm Ivy Bridge. it would still use like 5W.

My point was that while ARM only has to double in performance every year and
keep the same level of energy efficiency (which seems every ARM chip maker can
do), Intel will have to double the performance of Atom every year, while also
making the power draw of the chip much smaller than the previous generation.
So Intel has to do twice as much in the same time as ARM chip makers.

------
mberning
It seems unlikely for high end laptops and desktops. Intel continues to
dominate that performance category and doesn't show any sign of letting up.
When it comes time to crunch hours upon hours of video and audio you are going
to want a high end Intel processor. The lower end portables in Apple's lineup
I can definitely see incorporating ARM processors.

~~~
EwanToo
I agree - a Macbook Air and an iMac running iOS makes some sense, but not
things like the Macbook Pro and the Mac Pro - tools like Photoshop (and even
things like iMovie) would be crippled by the reduced CPU power.

------
pilif
I hope this stays a rumor. While I certainly prefer Mac OS to Windows, there's
still some development left to be done under Windows (Windows CE based barcode
scanners) and there are still more games available for Windows than for the
Mac.

Right now I can do the windows development in VMWare at acceptable speeds and
the gaming in bootcamp at excellent speeds.

If they move to ARM, that means no more gaming with Bootcamp and very, very
slow development if VMWare should decide to even begin emulating Intel
processors.

This would possibly force me to move away from Macs again which I would
really, really hate to have to do. Please, Apple, think this through before
rushing it.

~~~
AllenKids
I think this is just a far fetched rumor. But, didn't Microsoft just demo
Windows running on ARM and supposedly Windows 8 will be native on both
architectures?

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nextparadigms
This is the original article: [http://semiaccurate.com/2011/05/05/apple-dumps-
intel-from-la...](http://semiaccurate.com/2011/05/05/apple-dumps-intel-from-
laptop-lines/)

 _"Now you realize why Apple is desperately searching for fab capacity from
Samsung, Global Foundries, and TSMC. Intel doesn’t know about this particular
change of heart yet, which is why they are dropping all the hints about
wanting Apple as a foundry customer. Once they realize that Apple will be
fabbing ARM chips at the expense of x86 parts, they may not be so eager to
provide them wafers on advanced processes."_

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primeMover2010
.. original post on semiaccurate is filed under the category "humor" and
backed by the "fact" that previous rumours mentioned on sa turned out to be
"true".

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joev
Consider that Apple has neglected the non-Pro MacBook for quite a while: it
still uses a Core 2 Duo processor, and the MacBook Pro line includes a small-
form-factor 13" machine that uses the i5 and i7 chips.

If this rumor has any legs, I can definitely imagine Apple moving to ARM for
the MacBook Air and MacBook, to which will greatly benefit in terms of battery
life and size along with its iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV bretheren. Most of
these customers will be using the App Store, so the "fat binary" problem is
probably much less of an issue, since Apple can mandate that submitted apps
must be bundled for both platforms, which shouldn't be much of a problem if
XCode supports it. They will remain with Intel for the MacBook Pro and desktop
lines, for customers who need the CPU power, and are less sensitive to power
usage.

------
ssp
Part of this is probably Apple trolling Intel, but this one is pretty
believable because Apple generally don't care about protecting their
developers' investments, and because they can design ARM chips themselves.

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metageek
A more plausible direction, which could have been twisted into this rumor,
would be an iPad with a keyboard. It could invade the laptop niche, without
the support horrors of introducing an incompatible Mac.

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mahrain
Apple was on Motorola 68k for some 10 years, then on PowerPC for some 10 years
and now they're five years on Intel. If this is a pattern, they may be working
on the "next big thing" in a lab somewhere.

We know that OSX is very welcoming to architectures, with it's NeXT roots
supporting four architectures simultaneously.

A situation of a low-power ARM and high-performance Intel similarly to the
dual-GPU architecture seems more likely.

------
DanBlake
ARM's only advantage over x86 is power usage and licensing costs. In every
other factor, x86 absolutely blows it away. Alot of the newer tech coming from
intel is very, very sexy as well.

ARM has its place and is making great strides. But I for one wont be buying a
ARM apple anytime soon.

~~~
wladimir
Another advantage of ARM is a simpler and more straightforward instruction
set, unburdened by level after level of legacy. This makes both compilers and
chips simpler, more efficient, easier to design and less bug-prone.

There is nothing superior about x86, the Intel advantage is not because of the
instruction set but because of Intel's design/production processes. If Intel
produced ARM chips they'd blow everything away.

