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Apple seems to be doing very well with its own processors. But a recently published academic paper reveals that Apple was, at one point, attempting to port its operating system to work with ARM processors.
In fact, a former Apple intern, Tristan Schaap, who now serves as a Core OS engineer at the company, has explained how he was working on a project to get Mac OS X Snow Leopard working on ARM devices, reports Apple Insider.
The secret project became less clandestine when it was published by the Netherland’s Delft University of Technology. Apparently Schaap wrote up a Bachelor thesis on his 12 week Apple internship in 2010, but the research has been embargoed. How did he get on? Apparently during the course of the project, he managed to get devices “booting into a multi-user prompt,” though some issues still remained due to a “poor implementation on the debug hardware.”
What are the chances of this being real and relevant? Well, we know that Apple sometimes tests its engineers out on fake projects to make sure it can trust them, so it could be a pure dummy project. Or, equally likely, Apple was keen to understand more about the ARM architecture.
Either way, given Apple’s current dominance in the phone and tablet sector, I suspect a shift to ARM is unlikely. [Apple Insider]
Image credit: Travis Isaacs/flickr
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“given Apple’s current dominance in the phone and tablet sector”- Top selling phone != dominance of phone sector.
The conclusions of this article make no sense.
If Apple ported OSX to Arm then:
(a) They’d get better battery life out of their laptops
(b) They’d get less heat and power consumption out of all their devices
(c) They’d get more control of the design of the processors involved (if they use Apple-developed chips like iDevices do), and more control of manufacturing than depending on Intel.
(d) They could share more technology between OSX and iOS more easily
In return, they’d be left with a wealth of incompatible thirdparty software, perhaps needing another Rosetta initiative, and for the moment, top-end devices would be much less powerful. Unlike Microsoft, Apple haven’t invested heavily in a platform independent development system,, like .NET and the HTML5 stuff in Windows 8.
It would make reasonable sense for Apple to transition to Arm for OSX, I think, and they might well do so when they think the chips are up to handling it (just like they did with integrated Intel graphics hardware).
For the time being, it probably makes sense for them to keep their hand in, just in case.
Agreed, it’s like the blogger has thrown the ideas at the wall and tried to see what was going to stick. Apple doesn’t care about being on Intel, they’re a means to an end just like Motorola was.
I’m sure that the iOS and OSX will merge at some future date, probably once someone else has been doing it for a while. Since Windows 8 will be doing both intel and arm iOSX is likely to follow.
Microsoft do seem to be very forwards on this, I hear even their new phone OS is going to be just the same stripped back Windows 8 OS – same OS on computers, tablets and phones, who else is doing that in the next year or so? I guess it would be easy to do a beefed up Android for workstations and laptops.
I don’t think Apple cares too much what its tech is running on as long as it runs well on it. The best thing Apple did was to not be a hardware company, better in this world to focus on software and design – it means you ain’t going to have the cheapest hardware, but just focus on doing your job right and shop around.
Well Apple used to run on ARM architecture before intel with the PowerPC chips etc so it shouldn’t be new to them. It’ll be nice to not be locked into Intel and as Windows 8 is going to be offering an ARM edition it seems it’s the way things are going to be going.
ARM is certainly going to start coming up with some pretty beastly chips in times to come.
Could this be the very first step towards considering to license iOS to manufacturers who prefer the ARM processor option…