Here’s an interesting little detail from the latest version of Xcode: it supports Marvell’s quad-core, ARM compliant Armada XP processor. Could Apple be preparing to ditch its own A-Series of systems-on-chip and go instead with Marvell for future iPhones and iPads?
Well, hold your horses. While prototype iOS devices may well be running on an off-the-shelf Marvell quad-core ARM chip, Apple’s almost certainly going to produce a quad-core chip of its own in the A6 next year.
As Ars notes:
n Armada XP-powered prototype logic board would allow iOS or Mac OS X software engineers to experiment with performance tuning and other optimizations, while Apple’s hardware design team—comprised largely of former PA Semi and Intrinsity engineers—could continue working on a possible quad-core ARM design to be manufactured somewhere down the road.
In other words, this is probably just evidence of what everyone already guessed: that Apple’s A-Series of chips will be keeping up with the rest of the ARM world and go quad-core sometime soon. As you were.
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.
8 responses to “Hidden Xcode Support Hints That Apple Is Working On A Quad-Core iPad 3”
probably it’s the ARM powered MacBookAir more than the iPad3..
I don’t really know of any apps that would take advantage of four cores besides Safari since it would stick Javascript threads on a separate core. It’s not that significant really. My money is on an ARM-based MacBook Air in the next 1-2 years.
An ARM-powered quad-core MacBook Air seems very likely. Seeing the problems that the Windows ultrabook vendors are already having with competitive pricing, an ARM-powered MacBook Air would really have them squirming from pricing pressure. Even begging Intel to cut prices wouldn’t help them at all. It’s seeming all the more as if average consumers don’t really need the full power of a desktop OS to get them through the day. That’s why I have to question the Windows 8 strategy of running a full Windows desktop OS on tablets.
I don’t see how that would work. You’d have the same problems with Mac OS X as you would with Windows 8 – all the apps that were compiled for the Intel version of Mac OS X would be incompatible (unless run virtually, thus introducing a performance hit). That leaves out the Mac version of MS Office for sure, which I’m not sure Microsoft would retool for Apple’s ARM-based computers so as to hinder competition.  MS definitely will adapt Office for Windows 8 ARM tablets, though. So unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of their hat and makes iWork a much better option than MS Office, and 100% compatible with MS Office as well, the ARM-based Mac is going nowhere.