
Apple dumps Intel from laptop lines - kux
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/05/05/apple-dumps-intel-from-laptop-lines/?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4dc366db6b2536e0%2C0
======
Sidnicious
“Apple dumps Intel from laptop lines” is a bold headline for what at this
point is a rumor, no?

~~~
jeremymcanally
Especially from a site named "Semiaccurate." ;)

Kidding aside, this doesn't make much business sense. A lot of people buy Macs
and run Windows alongside OS X because their work requires Windows. Why would
Apple remove that whole segment of the market from their purchasers just to
save a few bucks on the chips? I don't think they will.

I also think this is slightly unlikely because it would probably require
substantial investment in rewriting a lot of the plumbing for OS X (I don't
know much about it).

And even further, why would they work on building their own chips like the
A4/5 and then put in the effort to end up using someone else's? If anything,
they'll either switch to something else just in the MBA's or you'll see A*
chips in there or something.

~~~
kux
Keep in mind Microsoft is also working on porting Windows to ARM. Ideally
there would be some form of Windows 8 able to run on the new Mac's by the time
the architecture transition occurs.

------
andrerobot
Really?

Moving away from the X86 instruction set 5 years after the move PowerPC is NOT
going to happen, period. ARM is fine for the iPad, but for high performance
work it doesn't cut it.

ARM tech & Intel have proven that they can scale, but only Intel has the
performance advantage for years to come.

And come on! Fragment the Mac market in laptops with ARM and workstations with
Intel chips is a really bad move. The only laptop that would have an ARM chip
would be an iPad with a keyboard.

~~~
phamilton
I think ARM is developing fine for high performance work. Nvidia's Denver is
probably going to be half GPU anyway, so parallel workloads will thrive on
their ARM chip.

I also think a RISC instruction set is starting to look pretty nice, since (as
I understand it) x86 chips break CISC instructions down to RISC-like micro-ops
anyway. Why not move that process off the die (where space, power and thermal
requirements are strict) into the compiler.

The transition away from PowerPC wasn't that tough in reality. If anything, it
told Apple that such a change is very possible. With Windows 8 coming to ARM,
it's not that big of a deal for Apple to follow suit.

~~~
greyfade
Yes, most implementations of x86 translate opcodes into equivalent RISC-like
micro-ops.

But this was necessary to achieve any kind of real performance with x86. It's
a terribly-designed architecture where all of the instructions are scattered
all over the map. There's no unifying design, and most operations that should
be simple to implement require scads of silicon. Much of the power wasted on
x86 chips is in that instruction decode hardware. It's terribly inefficient.
(It's also a horrible instruction set to deal with.)

------
kux
Apple has significant motivation to ditch x86 now that Intel has an effective
monopoly in high end x86 chips. Intel's fab process is 2+ years ahead of the
fabs used AMD and ARM competitors though, so Apple switching architectures
will only make sense in the long run.

ARM competes because of a more power efficient architecture; however, this
difference is less of an issue if Intel's fab process can get farther ahead of
the competition.

In short term(next 4 years) Intel's lead fab lead will likely continue to
grow, because Intel switched to Tri-Gate(FinFET) at the 22nm node while TSMC
and others will not adopt similar technologies until 16nm node(2014 or later).

------
maxharris
Well, that's fine if it's true. If it makes my next Mac even lighter, or have
a longer battery life, that's a good reason to do it. Honestly, I don't care
what ISA is used, and most people probably won't. Everything on the Mac app
store will port over pretty easily, so doing this will be even easier than it
was in 2005. All of the software I write nowadays is portable, so I don't care
even from that perspective (Python, Ruby and Javascript, etc. run on
anything). For me, this is about as much of a non-event as a switch to a
different GPU or RAM supplier.

~~~
r00fus
As long as the XCode toolchain exists on such devices (ie, they are full dev
devices), I would be more than thrilled to switch architectures with a new
MacbookARM.

