Interesting rumor - but could be true.

As I noted here before, once Apple completely dumped Rosetta (and the legacy PowerPC emulator), they were free to make a second, parallel version of Mac OSX for ARM.

Here's the latest rumor reporting:

[9to5mac.com]

With Jobs gone, I'm not sure Apple has enough pull with developers to convince them to attempt a third platform shift.

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N-OS X-tasy!
With Jobs gone, I'm not sure Apple has enough pull with developers to convince them to attempt a third platform shift.

Maybe they will run iOS with a Mac OS X emulator?

Of course they're experimenting with running the OS on multiple platforms. It'd be silly for them to ignore what's out there. That's no indication that Apple is planning to abandon Intel.

Intel is over a year behind in shipping their latest chips and even so, what they've got is many times faster than ARM.

There's no advantage for Apple to adopt ARM in lieu of Intel. Hardly worth talking about.

The flipside is interesting, tho. Intel is trying to make mobile chips to compete with ARM. In a couple of years, the iPhone might use an Intel CPU.

ARM has been the big money maker for Apple for a few years. Migrate Mac features over to iOS now that ARM is 64 bit. Kill off Intel Macs. The only people that will really complain are the Mac Pro users that paid $12k for circular doorstops. It is coming up on 18 months ago that I said the new Mac Pro will be the last version ever built.

I don't think Intel will like Thunderbolt on an ARM platform, but if it does not migrate over it won't be the first time Apple abandoned a standard they championed. Intel needs to start getting some high profile tablet and phone wins pretty soon or their stock is going to be in the dumps.

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

I remember predicting they this round of Macs might be the last, the next big update will be iOS notebooks and iMacs. Probably would serve all but the Pro users.

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Chakravartin
Of course they're experimenting with running the OS on multiple platforms. It'd be silly for them to ignore what's out there. That's no indication that Apple is planning to abandon Intel.

Intel is over a year behind in shipping their latest chips and even so, what they've got is many times faster than ARM.

There's no advantage for Apple to adopt ARM in lieu of Intel. Hardly worth talking about.

The flipside is interesting, tho. Intel is trying to make mobile chips to compete with ARM. In a couple of years, the iPhone might use an Intel CPU.

Maybe. Making all-day battery life on the MBA saved Intel, for now.

But I truly think that putting an A7 processor in a module the size of an Apple TV would make a terrific, super inexpensive computer. Just plug into a monitor via HDMI, connect to mouse and keyboard (or combo device) via bluetooth. There is more than enough horsepower for a cloud-based machine to compete with Chromeboxes, and would be running Mac OS X and using iWork etc.

And I'm assuming Apple is making the next ARM processor, making the A7 look slow.

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Chakravartin
Intel is over a year behind in shipping their latest chips and even so, what they've got is many times faster than ARM.

Faster processors is the last thing most users need. Most would do just fine with 20% of the processor power in their current computer.

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hal

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Chakravartin
Intel is over a year behind in shipping their latest chips and even so, what they've got is many times faster than ARM.

Faster processors is the last thing most users need. Most would do just fine with 20% of the processor power in their current computer.

If it were running the iOS and and "most" did nothing more than browse the simplest mobile web sites in Mobile Safari and never had to do anything else then you might be right.

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Chakravartin

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hal

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Chakravartin
Intel is over a year behind in shipping their latest chips and even so, what they've got is many times faster than ARM.

Faster processors is the last thing most users need. Most would do just fine with 20% of the processor power in their current computer.

If it were running the iOS and and "most" did nothing more than browse the simplest mobile web sites in Mobile Safari and never had to do anything else then you might be right.

No kidding. How slow do you want Handbrake to run? Or iMovie? If you switch to mobile, can you imagine 20% the power of the current 5s, that's something like my iPod touch 2nd gen. No one wants to use something that slow today.

The latest A7 processor is about 8x faster than your iPod Touch second gen:

[browser.primatelabs.com]

ARM is rapidly pushing the envelope of pure performance, so much so that many server farms are switching.

The main gripe for ARM performance has been GPU; Apple's been very aggressive adding its own home brew.

There is NO question in my mind that you could use an A&7 processor machine if you bothered to customize the Mac OS X build a bit.

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sekker
ARM is rapidly pushing the envelope of pure performance, so much so that many server farms are switching.

Not happening. Lots of discussion about what might occur when/if the chips are comparable to Intel's offerings and lots of small-scale experiments. But only discussion and experiments. Anyone running a full-fledged ARM based "server farm" is just screwing around and has nothing mission-critical to do with it.

The A7 can be brought up to a decent speed briefly before it cycles down to avoid overheating. Benchmarks reflect nearly acceptable performance in some niche areas, not as a general purpose processor.

...And if you read the rumor posts carefully, you'll see that Apple was allegedly experimenting with using 4 and 8 CPU combinations of quad-core 64-bit chips which is neither cost nor energy efficient.

It's just an experiment. Do not expect Apple to ship an ARM based mac in this decade.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/2014 06:24PM by Chakravartin.

AMD announced its ARM-CPUs for servers earlier this year:

[arstechnica.com]

And more recently:

[www.extremetech.com]

Amazon Web Services purchased a key design team from a former ARM Server company:

[www.enterprisetech.com]

I think that google is likely to be the first to go mainstream with ARM-based server farms:
[www.bloomberg.com]

Quote
sekker
AMD announced its ARM-CPUs for servers earlier this year:

[arstechnica.com]

And more recently:

[www.extremetech.com]

Amazon Web Services purchased a key design team from a former ARM Server company:

[www.enterprisetech.com]

I think that google is likely to be the first to go mainstream with ARM-based server farms:
[www.bloomberg.com]

...None of which indicates that enterprises are deploying ARM server farms for production.

It's early yet. It'll probably come.

But not today. And not tomorrow.

It's years away.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/2014 08:58PM by Chakravartin.