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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zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

it makes more sense to have more dedicated RISC cores: it's easier to stack cores on one die and the lower draw on power means the CPUs run cooler (as cooling top end multi-core monsters is always a bit of a battle).

Intel can do pretty much the same with Atoms? Actually, Intel might be furthest along WRT such many-chips solution (and future software support), with post-Larabee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MIC

Reply Parent Score: 2

Laurence Member since:
2007-03-26

Intel can do pretty much the same with Atoms? Actually, Intel might be furthest along WRT such many-chips solution (and future software support), with post-Larabee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MIC

Intel are far from alone. MIPS (I think it was) and IBM have both been doing this for years. In fact one such joint venture between IBM and Sony is sat in many peoples homes: the Playstation 3 Cell processor.

So I wouldn't say Intel are ahead of the game on this one - though they're certainly not sat idle either.

Reply Parent Score: 2

zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Your reply reminded me about one other curious many-cores project, which uses... ARM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker
http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/

And I guess I also meant there that Intel does seem the closest to really productising such architecture; also with their usual top-notch compilers expected. OTOH, they also had sort of failures along the way... (Larabee; too bad it seems to have killed Project Offset game/engine)

Yeah, I forgot about Cell ...but maybe there were good reasons for my omission? ;p
- not that many cores
- not homogeneous
- sort of failure, WRT goals (IIRC, PS3 was supposed to have only a Cell inside - when first performance results showed up, Sony contemplated using two Cells; eventually, they just used relatively classic CPU+GPU architecture)

Reply Parent Score: 2