Surprising absolutely no one, The Street is reporting that the Apple Tablet to be announced on January 27th has no Intel processor inside.
According to their source, Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar (who apparently has had conversations with Apple’s tablet design partners), Apple has predictably eschewed an Intel CPU for a low-power ARM processor created by P.A. Semi, a company which Cupertino acquired a couple of years ago.
To be honest, you’d have to be completely out of touch with the Apple landscape of the last couple of years to be flabbergasted by this news. Apple did not pick up P.A. Semi on an idle whim, and given that the Tablet is more likely to run an evolution of the iPhone OS than OS X, an ARM chip seems pretty much a given, especially given the power efficiency requirements of a tablet? Yet the Street reports:
There has been speculation that Intel’s new generation of Atom chips was in the running for the slot… If you believe that the closely-watched Apple Tablet will reshape the mobile computing landscape, then the snub deals Intel a significant defeat. Intel had a lock on the netbook market with its Atom processors and it was widely assumed that the chip giant would win the Tablet contract at all costs.
“Widely assumed?” Who seriously thought the tablet would pack an Atom processor? Heck, Apple’s been dropping Atom support, at least in Snow Leopard. Given Apple’s ownership of P.A. Semi, it’s been a lock since the get go.
