Apple dumps Intel from laptop lines (Not Confirmed, Rumor)

[takemehomegrandma]

The short story is that Apple is moving the laptop line, and presumably desktops too, to ARM based chips as soon as possible. With A15/Eagle allowing more than 32-bit memory access, things look up, but it seems silly to do so before the full 64 bit cores come in the following generation. Nvidia is directly telling certain favored analysts that they will have Denver out in Q4 of 2012, maybe Q1/2013, and that uses the full on 64-bit ARM instruction set. It won’t be out by then, but that gives you a good estimation of when that ISA will break cover from one vendor or other. Think mid-2013.

You can read the full story here: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/05/05/apple-dumps-intel-from-laptop-lines/

Got to love the name of the source for this one: "Semi Accurate"!

Anyway, I won't read too much into this, although I'm not saying it won't happen. Feels a bit unlikely, they "just" jumped architecture afterall...

But I have said it many times before - ARM will scale upwards a lot easier than x86 will scale downwards. ARM will, backed by at least nVidia (who is making a "x86 killer" to use their own words) and Microsoft (who *already* have a complete Windows and Office running on ARM), compete with x86 at its own traditional arenas (desktop, server and workstation), but no x86 on horizon is really capable of competing with ARM in a similar manner.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next Xbox (720 or whatever it will be called) will be based on ARM.

[takemehomegrandma]

I really hope this is true. I would love to see something other than x86 take off in the desktop and laptop realm

Well, take a look at this video then (at 1:10):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKc_XGuvNIk



And at least nVidia (I see no reason to why others (like Freescale) won't follow) have announced "that it plans to build high-performance ARM® based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers."

Here is more on that.

although I would prefer it to be PowerPC.

What part of "PPC is dead" don't you understand? OK, not dead as in "no chips will be developed or manufactured anymore", but dead for any kind of contexts interesting to us?

ARM is the future...

[jj]

I fail to see what is relevant in this news item to the "Amiga News and Community Anouncememnts" section.
 
Otherwise, a valid news topic for OSnews or MacRumors.

 
I fail to see why people like you always bang about this.
 
Do you want a link
 
Amiga 68k - Mac 68k
Amiga PPC - Mac PPC
Mac X86
Mac ARM
 
Do you see the connection. Stop whininnig like a little girl and go hang around somwhere else if it bothers you sooooooo much

[yssing]

What part of "PPC is dead" don't you understand? OK, not dead as in "no chips will be developed or manufactured anymore", but dead for any kind of contexts interesting to us?

ARM is the future...

To you maybe. I quite like the PPC

[beakster2]

It would be nice to see OS X on the Arm however...  I like to use OS X as my main desktop OS but I am a .Net developer by trade so I always have 1 or 2 Windows VMs running on my MacBook.  I'd worry that switching to ARM will make running x86 VMs slow as we need to go back to emulating x86 like we had to do when OS X was PPC only.

[x303]

Oh, come on. We had topics here a few weeks about talking about Amiga on ARM.  I think AROS has ARM support, right?

Yeah, why not follow the same path and go ARM ?!

[Iggy]

To you maybe. I quite like the PPC

Seconded. ARM only offers a cost advantage and X86 still has a distinct performance advantage.
I'm willing to stay with the ISA I'm currently using.

[commodorejohn]

It would be nice to see OS X on the Arm however...  I like to use OS X as my main desktop OS but I am a .Net developer by trade so I always have 1 or 2 Windows VMs running on my MacBook.  I'd worry that switching to ARM will make running x86 VMs slow as we need to go back to emulating x86 like we had to do when OS X was PPC only.

If Microsoft's looking aat ARM support for Windows 8, you can bet they'll have an ARM-native .NET VM, given how much they've been pushing .NET in recent years. Besides, doesn't Mono already run on ARM?

[kedawa]

To you maybe. I quite like the PPC

I quite like Audrey Hepburn, but I don't expect to see her starring in any new films.

[dammy]

Well, the difference is stabbing Motorola and IBM in the back killed off PPC on the desk/laptop (well, that and some technical reasons).  I'm not too sure that stabbing Intel in the back is going to result in the same outcome...

Or Intel could be the foundry for the A15s.  I'm sure Intel would make up for the loss of selling their own CPUs to Apple in one fashion or another.

[dammy]

Oh, come on. We had topics here a few weeks about talking about Amiga on ARM.  I think AROS has ARM support, right?

There is AROS ARM Linux Hosted.  I would guess that it would be (and I hope so) full native ARM version in a year or two.

[Trev]

This wouldn't be a bad thing for Intel. Competition from AMD and various ARM implementations has only made Intel products better.

[jj]

Well Intel have cracked the 3d transistor so expect even better from them soon

[kedawa]

I was reading about last week. It's a fairly obvious and very old idea, but I guess it just required fabrication technology that they didn't have until recently. It's really fascinating stuff, at least to me.

[persia]

Apple left PPC because PPC wasn't interested in Apple.  For years Apple tried to convince the world that G5's were somehow mystically magically better than the equivalent X86 architecture running at faster speeds.  It never really worked.  And of course IBM abandoned Apple, they refused to produce a G5 mobile on any kind of reasonable timetable.

So Apple moved, any the myth of G5 was broken when even Rosetta applications ran faster on X86 than a G5.

I suspect the talk of ARM is based on the success of iOS devices.  OS X and iOS are pretty much two heads of one beast.  Under the bonnet there's no real difference.  It makes sense to at least consider bringing them to the same architecture.  You can get rid of some of the doubling that way.  And with Microsoft producing an ARM version of Windows, you can still dual boot/run a virtual MS Windows session on Apple equipment. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS Windows ARM desktops in the future.

Apple always plays 3 to 5 years out, it's why they are still here and Amiga is coming back as a boring Chinese Windows box.  You don't sit on your laurels.  Todays hot is tomorrow's retro nostalgia.  I can't say that they will make the move to ARM, but I can say they'd be stupid not to at least put it on the table for discussion.

[Fats]

I was reading about last week. It's a fairly obvious and very old idea, but I guess it just required fabrication technology that they didn't have until recently.

And they did not have it before because it was not really needed up to now. The transistors are now becoming too small so they have be wrapped around the silicon to be able to turn off the device. Up to 32nm this was not really needed. Of course, that's not how marketing people will tell the story.

greets.
Staf.