Cause if there is a hurdle in the future they won't have the years to design a solution. They'll have to already spent the years making the solution. Ie better to have a solution you never have to use then get caught with your pants down and no immediate solution.
Improve battery = less performance
Its science; more watts = more power
This is an annoying rumor
we should be discussing what the next big thing apple will roll out in 2013, damn the guy who extracted this news
love you intel, reason i love macs
Ahh I get it. So even if they don't switch to ARM they could still have them in their corner down the road. Gotcha. For some reason I was thinking they would just drop intel and switch to ARM immediately
Because they have to keep their options open. Intel's doing great right now but that might not always be the case - the Pentium 4 was an atrocious processor and AMD trumped them in almost every way. These days AMD isn't really much of a contender due to comparatively lacklustre performance. If Intel missteps and spends another 5 years pushing a poor processor, Apple might do well to use a different technology.
You must have missed out on the PowerPC days. They were fun....and the computers felt powerful back then.
From what I hear, it's much easier to develop multicore variants of the ARM chips than it is with the intel processors. In other words, Apple could develop a 24-core ARM-based processor that performance-wise totally obliterates anything that any Ivy Bridge processor can do. And Apple will do this. It's not CISC folks, it's RISC. ARM is RISC-based, and yes, it's much-much better.
Honestly, I think this rumor continues to be premature. The gap is just too big. I'm sure there is a skunkworks-like project, kind of like project Marklar, to put ARM in Macs, but we don't know if it will happen or not. With Marklar, it did eventually happen when PowerPC reached the end of its rope. Intel hasn't reached the end of its rope yet, so this will remain a contingency plan for the foreseeable future.
Im not sure I want a arm chip truth be told. I am hoping this is just to sort of poke the beehive known as intel to produce cooler more energy efficient chips. Apple has pushed this and made it known to intel that its something they want so they can further push the boundaries of design.
How would this affect one's ability to use Windows through Bootcamp?
This would be a very silly move.
Switching to their own chips I could possibly understand, but ARM? Eventually they're going to let them down just like IBM and Intel.
If ANYTHING happens, Apple will design their own in-house x86/64 CPUs.. Much like AMD is to Intel.
What's wrong with striving to an architecture independent platform?
They will have more bargain power, and more choice.
Don't think anyone would enjoy having to rewrite every dingle piece of software ever written for the Mac, or else run it in emulation, 20 times slower than if you didn't switch from Intel. The switch from PPC to Intel only just finished completely, a few years ago, when pretty much PCC is no longer supported by anyone. Are we going to have to start all over again, just to get slightly faster computer?