Bloomberg: Apple considering switching Macs to ARM
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Nov 2012 23:40 UTC
Apple Another Apple-to-switch-Macs-to-ARM post. "Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005." No idea when Apple will make the switch, but they will do it. I'm thinking 5-10 year timeframe.
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kovacm
Member since:
2010-12-16

Few people run applications that need that kind of raw power, and the few times it is required, a switch to multiple RISC cores over fewer CISC cores might pay dividend in the long run.

x86 are RISC from PentiumPro ;)

real speedup coming from massive parallelism of GPU.

Reply Parent Score: 0

viton Member since:
2005-08-09

x86 are RISC from PentiumPro

It is simply wrong. It never was (except RISC86 core) and most microops now translated into 1 CISC instruction. Also there is a pure CISC-y Atom.

Edited 2012-11-07 04:15 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

kovacm Member since:
2010-12-16

"x86 are RISC from PentiumPro

It is simply wrong. "
it is simple true.

since PentiumPro intel take all benefits from RISC philosophy! (but he still had (/ have even today) burden of translation of x86 instruction to microops - burden that prevent him to compete with ARM).

RISC vs CISC war is end long time ago... everything is RISC-like today.

and most microops now translated into 1 CISC instruction

could you elaborate this?? give some examples?

Reply Parent Score: 1

henderson101 Member since:
2006-05-30

The only RISC that was ever part of x86 was so deep in the processor core and pipelines that no one programming the processor for general use ever noticed. It was only intensive applications where any special kind of optimisation made a lot of difference. The whole point of the x86/IA32 architecture was that it was meant to be backwardly compatible with the previous generations.

Again, RISC core + CISC userspace interface /= RISC processor

Edited 2012-11-07 11:06 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3