Intel’s talking a lot of smack about ARM lately. Around a month ago, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that he wasn’t worried about Apple ditching Intel for ARM chips. And today, Intel’s chief financial officer, Stacy Smith, is openly scoffing at the possibility, saying Intel’s way ahead of ARM when it comes to performance.
Smith’s comments were made in an interview with Business Insider late last week, when asked whether or not Intel was feeling the pinch from ARM.
“Our leadership over the rest of the industry is extending,” Smith said. “We’re not delayed relative to the industry. We’re actually ahead of the industry.”
“For a customer like Apple you’d have to take a big step off performance to step off our architecture,” Smith said. “That is what in essence enables us to win across different customers.”
As I’ve argued before, the drawbacks of Apple shifting from Intel to ARM for the Mac platform would be great. Although our iPhones and iPads feel speedy, Intel chips are significantly more powerful than ARM chips, at least as it stands. Apple would effectively be taking a technological step back, and it would have to re-engineer all OS X software to work on the new chipset.
That said, Apple might do it. It likes controlling its own technology, and with ARM, Apple can design its own desktop chips. It’s also worth noting that reputable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that an ARM-based Mac isn’t a matter of if, but when. He’s usually right. That should make Intel very worried.
Source: Business Insider
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
4 responses to “Intel says ARM-based Macs would be much slower”
That doesn’t seem likely. Apple could put 4 seperate ARM chips in a Mac, and it would probably still use less power than a comparable “desktop” Intel processor.
I think that is what is worrying for Intel. Apple has proven itself the absolute master of seamless platform transition. There’s already the glue needed to get all those chips running in harmony, all it would take is an x86 emulator for ARM, and that’s another huge market Intel loses out on.
Translation :
“We are scared to death that Apple will do this”
Basically
Seeing how most people using (Operating System of choice) are mostly checking email, going online, or any one of a hundred different tasks that don’t require the power of a quad-core I7 and 16 GBs of RAM, Intel SHOULD be worried. Apple has been pulling back from “professional” users for a long time as they really are a very small portion of the overall market.
The iPad has shown that a low-powered device can do nearly everything the average user needs or wants to do (including angst-filled blogs, configuring a router, audio and video editing, and image editing) that if Apple really wanted to, they could come up with a desktop version of iOS (yes I know iOS is derived from OS X) that could practically overnight outsell the Mac.
Apple is going to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for Intel or anyone else that sells components for Apple products