Once again there are rumors of a potential, upcoming architectural switch for
Apple Mac's:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-05/apple-said-to-be-exploring-switch-from-intel-chips-for-the-mac.htmlThis is far from being the first rumor of this kind, many similar has circulated over the net during the last few years. One almost begin to wonder if there is a certain threshold when one can actually start using the old "where there is smoke, there is fire" saying.
The usual responses to these rumors are: "Bullsh!t, ARM doesn't have enough performance", and the people saying so are usually sitting in the car of present, driving down the road of time, and looking at the various ARM CPU's in their rear mirror. A natural thing to do (looking in the rear mirror that is), since the road goes over a hill a bit further down the road, a hill blocking the view of whats at the other side of the crest. So since you don't have a picture of the future, but you do of the past, your comments couldn't possibly be anything other than the one above.
But just because you and me and all the other common people can't see at all what's on the other side of the hill, it doesn't matter that there aren't people there doing stuff already, things we are about to see in a year or two when we actually drives over that hill and gets our first view over the previously hidden horizon.
If I may speculate, I think
Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief of the nVidia corporation, will be standing there with a few new CPU's based on their "Denver" concept.
"within the next three or four years we’re going to bring to the mobile market performance that is nearly a hundred times higher than today’s’ PC." (That was 1.5 years ago)
"ARM is now the only CPU in the world that will have deep penetration in the mobile devices, the PC, servers and supercomputers."They have been working with this for years, and should almost be ready. He is the guy who brought us a true computer graphic evolution (through competition and fabless production), he is the guy who brought us the GPU, the concept that took graphics and gaming to a whole new dimension by its enormous performance in running massively paralleled code. He has delivered. He has reformed and evolved a whole industry. Twice. Now he is very confident it will happen again with a whole new class of processor. And while you and me can't really see this yet (we will come over that hill in a year or two), I have no doubt whatsoever that both Apple and Microsoft is sitting down at nVidias briefings and presentations (or by now, maybe even demonstrations) of the thing. And within context like this, the "migration" rumors like the one mentioned above doesn't sound like "bullsh!t" anymore.
What did the nVidia chief have to say about a possible Mac OS migration to ARM?
Q: Is ARM on the Mac OS possible?A: "I don’t know their plans but if you look at it from 10,000 feet, it seems to make sense, right? Because if they go Mac on ARM, they could address some of their concerns with their own SOC. So instead of paying $150, they can pay $15."Nothing in his answer about whether it would be
technically doable at all, if it would make
technologically sense, that seems to be *a given* in his reply (and he has unique inside knowledge of the products ahead, nobody can deny that). No instead he focus on IP and the economic side of doing their own SoC. Which Apple seems to be quite aware about themselves, releasing their own SoC CPU's every half a year or so.
So it will be indeed very interesting to see what's behind that crest of the hill that the road of time will pass over in a year or so.
