Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Nov 2012 23:40 UTC
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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RE[4]: Rest assured that apple has been running arm internally
by Neolander on Wed 7th Nov 2012 06:49
in reply to "RE[3]: Rest assured that apple has been running arm internally"
Member since:2010-03-08
Member since:
2010-12-16
simple answer: if they want to switch to ARM than they could use GPU to compensate speed difference between ARM and intel x86 chips!
and even on desktop x86 you will need to utilize GPU in future if you want real impressive speed gain!
at the end speed of x86 would be less and less relevant! - "it should be only fast enough for "Office-like" jobs..." and real speed (where it is needed) will come from GPU.
even AMD bet entire company on this premise! - CPU part could be anything (ARM/x86); it does not matter. GPU is one that count. look at latest AMD GPUs - they go so far that you can pass pointers from x86 directly to GPU, they add exception support, virtual memory and page tables, calls and conditional branches, integer operations with 256 GPR. it looks like complete CPU and still massive SIMD monster.
they only need "fast enough" x86 execution since real speed will come from SIMD GPU.