According to Semiaccurate, Apple is working on a plan to migrate all of their MacBooks over to ultra-efficient ARM processors by 2013. But does that really make sense?
Says SemiAccurate:
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.
On the surface of things, this makes sense: laptops are still mobile devices, and mobile devices tend to work better with ARM thanks to their energy efficiency. That said, current MacBooks don’t really have energy efficiency problems. The least of Apple’s laptops (the 11.6-inch MacBook Air) packs almost 6 hours of battery life into a package the size of a padded envelope; the MacBooks and MacBook Pros boast between 8-10 hours.
Meanwhile, spurred largely by the explosion of the mobile market and the sudden and surprise dominance of ARM, Intel’s been taking some big strides in slimming down the energy profile of their own chips. It seems reasonable to believe that they’ll continue to do so.
The big question here is whether or not Apple thinks that ARM is just going to completely blow Intel out of the water when it comes to balancing processing power and energy efficiency long term. Certainly, ARM’s astonishing, short-term growths, if they can be sustained, might toppled Intel’s control over the laptop and desktop market… but it’s hardly a sure thing.
My best guess is that Apple has been smart enough to be working on two versions of OS X over the past few years: one for Intel processors, the other for ARM. They’ve got a contingency in place, if and when ARM processors make better business sense for desktops and laptops than X86 based processors. It’s up to Intel to make sure that ARM version of OS X never gets shipped out.
[via MacStories]
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.
20 responses to “Will Apple Switch To ARM Processors For MacBooks By 2013?”
This is a good news :) . I am waiting for upgrade my macbook. Thank you for your post :)
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Wasn’t there an article like yesterday about how iOS devices might be moving to Intel?
http://www.cultofmac.com/repor…
I highly doubt this is real. Apple can’t switch JUST the laptops to ARM. Then they would have to have two different versions of OS X, and developers would have to have two different versions of all their apps (one for laptops, one for desktops). And since there is little chance of an ARM-based Mac Pro or iMac, we can safely assume that there will be no ARM-based laptops either.
There are already 4 different versions of OS X. PPC, x386, x86_64, and ARM (iOS). OS X developers like myself are already used to supporting the first three. It’s not much of a difference to us (at a simplified level, just configure to compile for all three, and they are all stuck in the same app’s FAT binary). The real problem is going to be the OS emulating the older architectures before all the devs have a chance to re-compile their apps (like Rosetta did for PPC) and in running Windows (I’ve heard Windows 8 will run on ARM, but I can’t confirm that).
It’s possible, I mean there’s a version of OSX for ARM (iOS) but I guess it comes down to how iOS 5.0 will pan out. As the chips get faster and there is more memory, I suppose the question is, so much like a desktop OS will iOS become. With Lion Mac OS seems to be meeting it somewhere in the middle. Mac sales are growing, so I suspect a full migration away from intel is unlikely. But hey, we’ve had fat binaries before and there could be no reason not to host Mac OS on an ARM chip if there were compelling reasons to do so. I imagine that would include ultra portables and ultra thin lifestyle machines (possibly TVs or iMac variants). A tiny Mac mini would be entirely possible too. Perhaps they could have many more cores running than a intel chip could? I guess we shall see.
In the end, all the extra grunt from the chips has to mean something. iOS has shown you can create innovative software without needing massively powerful chips. Having a computer with a blisteringly hot chip inside it may soon be a thing of the past. The iMac and particularly the iPad are about the computer as an object and the possibilities that approach opens up…
Not that Apple has spared a lot of love for the Mac Pro in their headlong pursuit of the “consumer” market.
Jus’ sayin’. But at the Mac Pro’s princely price points, I’d like the machines to be the Dominant Monsters the Power PC Tower Machines were. The last update was .. .fine.. but quite underwhelming.
Apple was never going to switch to Intel; until they did. They dumped the PPC because IBM wouldn’t invest in the development necessary for Apple to grow. They couldn’t meet delivery, performance, or quality expectations. If Intel can’t meet Apple’s need for the future they’ll be dumped just as fast. I wouldn’t be shocked if Apple constantly works with multiple chip designers, just to make sure they keep their options available.
About ARM specifically, does Apple own somebody who makes and/or designs these? That’s an obvious hint to the future.
If memory serves, does Apple not already have a *lot* of experience with ARM chips? Remember the days when our Mac’s run those blistering faster-than, Intel scorching, PowerPC chips? These were RISC based architecture- it’s what the R in ARM stands (or stood for), RISC.
Hunt around YouTube for the old Apple ad’s that tell us how much faster our PowerPC Mac’s were compared to those ol’ Pentium Intel chips. If I’ve understood what I’ve read the PowerPC chip was that more faster because it was also very power efficient, because of the design.
I believe that it’s very likely Apple may have continued to develop Leopard, Snow Leopard & even Lion for a PowerPC/RISC/ARM chip.
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