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According to a report form Bloomberg News, Apple is considering switching away from the Intel chips that have been powering Mac computers for years, in favour of chips designed in-house, like the A6 and A6X powering the new iPhone 5 and iPad 4.
Apple’s shown a renewed interest in chip building recently. In September, it was confirmed that the A6 chip in the iPhone 5 was a custom core designed by Apple using ARM’s reference designs. In the past, Apple had just tinkered here and there with pre-designed cores on its chips, like the Cortex A9 or A15. It was a huge step for Apple.
The talk escalated when Apple hired top chip designer Jim Mergard away from Samsung. Mergard had spent 16 years with AMD before that, and was working on Samsung’s growing interest in designing its own Exynos chips. That was followed pretty quickly and predictably by reports that Apple was trying to wean itself off of Samsung’s chip manufacturing services.
And just a week or so ago, Bob Mansfield returned to the company to consolidate all wireless and semiconductor development into one big Technologies division.
Since Apple switched to Intel chipsets in 2006, with the Core Duo in the new iMac, Apple has run its machines with standard Intel chips, from the Core 2 Duo on the the newer Core generations.
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They could easily buy AMD, but then with the latest ARM cores having out of order processes the world may no longer really need x86.
and maybe, just maybe, AMD could be relevant again… ;-;
well considering amd will have their chips in virtually every next gen console out there and also have some highly competitive desktop and laptop gpus they still seem pretty relevant to me
that success is bought. their current desktop CPU range is pretty bad. Apple probably don’t even consider an AMD chip because they’re so behind in performance. if they purchase and improve the brand, they can possibly remove dependencies on Samsung and create a more competitive product altogether,
You can’t buy an Arm chip that’s as fast as the intel chip powering the bottom-of-the-line Mac Mini from 2010 (probably even earlier than that). And 64-bit Arm chips only exist in a laboratory in Cambridge.
There is a long, long way to go before Arm chips could satisfactorily replace Intel ones, it’s even possible that they will never eclipse high or even mid range performance. The only near-future possibility is that Apple might put Arm chips in Macbook Airs, and then that would mean maintaining development of the OS across two architectures, possibly indefinitely.
I wonder if what we might be more likely to see is a slightly larger pseudo-ultrabook form factor for iOS devices, running on Arm chips in Macbook Air-like cases (iPads actually cope remarkably well with a bluetooth keyboard attached). Given how Apple responded to the 7 inch tablet boom, it might be their ideal response to a wave of Windows 8 touchscreen laptops.
Maybe a shift to focus on using iOS for productivity might mean they even furnish the OS with its missing Finder (complete with WinRT-style restrictions to the equivalent of a My Documents folder), and external local storage access.
A5 = Pentium Pro circa 1995, according to this:
http://www.cultofmac.com/144942/why-youll-probably-never-own-a-mac-with-an-arm-processor-feature/
64 bit isn’t the important part, out of order processing is and the latest ARM chips have this, if Apple create a multi-layered ARM chip with a deeper pipeline then they could start moving forward, they control their software so if they manage to make a serious break through in parallel computing then ARM chips could challenge Intel.
But without 64 bit, wouldn’t that mean it would be limited to 4GB addressable memory?
OSX Lion onward only has support for 64-bit processors, they’d have to resurrect the whole 32-bit mode again if they wanted to port it to the A6, or a future Cortex 15 based chip.
I’m not saying 64bit isn’t important it’s just that a 64 bit with in-order processing would be a total performance death.
ARM = Advanced RISC Machine
RISC = Reduced instruction set computing
Reduced instruction set means that it has less instruction sets.
So it will not be able to perform complex calculations as fast.
x86 will not last forever but it will not be ARM that replaces it.
It’s not as simple as that. Having a smaller instruction set doesn’t necessarily mean it’s slower. It might take more instructions to do a square root for example, but it might still be quicker than doing a single square root instruction on a CISC architecture.
“It’s not as simple as that.”
Well CPU architecture are never simple are they.
But as a general rule a architecture designed to perform a few instructions very fast is never going to have enough instructions to be used to full workstation use where you may need specific instructions for things like virtualisation or rendering.
Its the same reason why we still have CPUs, GPUs are far more powerful but they have limited instructions.
I’m not sure RISC means what you think it means. Really it’s more about the programmers interface to the CPU than how it works internally. With a CISC architecture like x86, it has a lot of separate instructions for things like square root, where as a RISC architecture (ARM, PowerPC) would take multiple instructions to do the same thing. However what is represented to the programmer (in the assembly language) does not necessarily represent how it actually executes the instruction. Apparently modern x86 CPUs effectively translate single CISC-like instructions into multiple RISC-like instructions internally.
I mentioned PowerPC being a RISC architecture. That’s what’s used in the current generation of games consoles, what was previously used in Apple Macs. Using a RISC architecture isn’t a limitation, it’s just a different design concept.