



I. Change Ahead?




ARM core
[Image Source: Maximum PC]



II. Lesson From the PowerPC Era




PowerPC G3



Source: Bloomberg

Comments     Threshold


If it happens
By Shadowself on 11/6/2012 2:56:52 PM , Rating: 2
IF it happens, it won't happen before 2020 at the earliest.

The MacPro line won't move over to ARM before then for sure. Apple is just as likely to kill the MacPro line as to move it to ARM.

The iMac line is possible by 2020, but very unlikely before then. Apple is still shipping i5 and i7 chips in the iMac and likely will be shipping the equivalents through 2020. The processing power in even the newly announced (and details in rumors) for the 64 bit ARM designs won't catch up to where Haswell will be until at least 2020.

No matter what there will be a step back in performance in going from the then i7 or Xeon equivalent of whenever the switch is made and the then current ARM system. ARM is a reasonable compromise between performance and power draw. The i7 and Xeon chips weight the equation very heavily in favor of performance and NOT in favor of low power draw.

Also note that the focus of Haswell and Broadwell are on the lower power end (not as low as ARM, but certainly lower than Intel has focused on before) AND that the Intel has yet to even informally announce the dates for the Xeon versions of Ivy Bridge.

Intel knows that going forward their profits are going to come from lower power chips. In the next five years Intel is going to sell many, many more "mobile" chips (think i3 and i5 equivalents) than workstation ships (think i7 and Xeon). Intel is going to follow the money.

Some people have gone so far as to say that Apple's chip design teams are larger than the teams at DEC or SUN when they started their own workstation CPU design efforts -- as if that is justification enough for Apple to design its own desktop related chips. And what happened to Alpha and SPARC?

I don't expect Apple to make its third chip switch (1. 68k to PPC, 2. PPC to x86 and 3. x86 to Ax) for the Mac before 2020. I'd be truly shocked if it happens before 2017.

The last fly in the ointment is the Mac's Windows compatibility. While some may claim it is just coincidence that Mac sales have increased since Apple started directly supporting people Windows on the Mac. Apple must know that Windows support is critical to the Mac. I doubt Apple will ever get Microsoft to tweak Windows for an Apple specific implementation of the ARM designs.

RE: If it happens
By DanNeely on 11/6/2012 3:12:15 PM , Rating: 2

I'd certainly hope they are. A modern SOC dwarfs an 80s/90s era RISC chip in complexity.

