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Apple Considering Switch From Intel Chips in Future Macs
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This will never happen. Corporations and businesses are too tied into the desktop market. There's also some people, actually millions, that need to the computing power of a desktop. Not to mention it is not fun to have to type a lengthy document or do a power point presentation on a tablet. Plus, due to Apple's restrictions, there are still a lot of things you can only do on a desktop.
Yep. Servers in closets and clouds will still exist, of course, but most people will have stopped buying "PC" for home and business use.
We've already crossed the point where most computing is now NOT done on laptops/desktops. It's done on phones and tablets. So I don't even consider my statement a prediction, I consider it a simple acknowledgement of what is already clearly happening.
Just like the iDevices which have proven to be wildly successful.
Yes. The next 4 years are sure to let us know just how this sector pans out. Is power saving worth more than brute force?
"Millions" is a tiny sliver of the market.
Which is exactly why Dell, HP, etc, have such a bloody hard time making money.
I don't recall anyone bashing the move to Intel. The only thing that people were up in arms about was the Osborne Effect. Otherwise, pretty much everyone lauded the move, especially people planning their first Hacintosh.
We already know the answer to that from (eg) Facebook access patterns.
Mobility and battery power are now more important to most people, most of the time, than is sheer horsepower.
Nowhere near yet. Tablets and phones have taken a chunk out of media consumption and communcation, but actual work? From simple things like typing up spreadsheets and documents, to photo editing and creating movies? That's still done on a PC.
Well, what was I supposed to write? Billions? That's too much. Hundreds of millions sounds awkward.
It was Bloomberg. And it's not nonsense. Maybe if we didn't learn anything from technology as we developed it, you'd be right. But as we learn, we develop new ways of making faster, smaller, and more powerful processors on all fronts. In the future, ARM may very well be able to replace intel. With what we know now, though, definitely not.
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And Intel Chips surely wont develop further
I'm not saying they won't. But the reason there's such a huge push for ARM is that it's strong enough for the average person. Even microsoft agrees. They have standard (arm) tablets and pro (intel) tablets. But that's only because of the limitations of ARM. In the future we won't see those limitations and it may replace intel as what the masses need. It almost has already.
I am in the same boat. I use Photoshop, Quicken and MS Office on a daily basis. Photoshop, Excel, Word, Handbrake and MakeMKV are interchangeable between Mac and Windows so I have them on both platforms.
I love the Mac ecosystem, ease of use, visuals and all that, and in fact have three Macs sitting on the same desk. However if I had to make a choice it would be Windows. Once Stardock and I worked our way around of the cesspool that is Metro I've found Windows 8 to be really nice to use. It even looks good once you get rid of the blue-on-blue-on-blue default color scheme.
Could give me a source for the second statement? That the most computing is now done on phones and tablets?
Interesting.
If apple did this this wouldn't be a move to a weaksauce mobile oriented ARM architecture, they'd build chips from the ground up, albeit using that instruction set to have a tangible advantage over intel's offerings.
Why would they do this? Well, they could then have the same platform for iOS and Mac OS X, they'd have yet more control, one more step of the process in house.
I was at a talk given by sophie wilson a while back, who created the ARM architecture. She was asked by a member of the audience about intel's efforts to enter ARMs business model and whether they'd have success given the baggage of x86. She quipped that there was no real difference between the architectures, that the differences between RISC and CISC were meaningless with micro-ops and such. Intel is good at it's primary market for the sole reason that it's what it focuses on, same with ARM, were they to focus on each others markets how well they would do at them would depend on the effort spent rather than any quirk of architecture.
There's no reason apple couldn't make it their focus to produce a desktop class ARM chip, they have the licence to, they have the money and they have the expertise, I suspect they may well do it in time.
They could certainly make their own x86 chip too, though I do feel like they'd prioritise unifying their platforms over letting you bootcamp.
As nuts as that all sounds it'd certainly be amusing to see apple shake things up, there's one thing the world certainly doesn't need and that's intel having a monopoly and given the way AMD has declined that's how things seem to be going.
If apple did this this wouldn't be a move to a weaksauce mobile oriented ARM architecture, they'd build chips from the ground up, albeit using that instruction set to have a tangible advantage over intel's offerings.
Why would they do this? Well, they could then have the same platform for iOS and Mac OS X, they'd have yet more control, one more step of the process in house.
I was at a talk given by sophie wilson a while back, who created the ARM architecture. She was asked by a member of the audience about intel's efforts to enter ARMs business model and whether they'd have success given the baggage of x86. She quipped that there was no real difference between the architectures, that the differences between RISC and CISC were meaningless with micro-ops and such. Intel is good at it's primary market for the sole reason that it's what it focuses on, same with ARM, were they to focus on each others markets how well they would do at them would depend on the effort spent rather than any quirk of architecture.
There's no reason apple couldn't make it their focus to produce a desktop class ARM chip, they have the licence to, they have the money and they have the expertise, I suspect they may well do it in time.
They could certainly make their own x86 chip too, though I do feel like they'd prioritise unifying their platforms over letting you bootcamp.
As nuts as that all sounds it'd certainly be amusing to see apple shake things up, there's one thing the world certainly doesn't need and that's intel having a monopoly and given the way AMD has declined that's how things seem to be going.
Obviously iDevices are not Macs. And most people do not like them either - Apple has just 15% share in smart phones quickly approaching that of the Macs (6% worldwide)
This could be the end of Apple (and if they do it, good riddance at that). Time to move back to Windows, I think. I'd like to NOT repeat the BS software abandonment I got with my PowerPC Mac (and which seems to be standard fare with iOS devices).
It seems Apple is less interested in computers and maintaining a useful and complex software base and more interested in toys with short, limited lifespans that are more or less disposable so they can keep selling you newer versions every year. Odd how they claim to be a more "green" company when they keep making their iOS devices ever more disposable with shorter and shorter useful lifespans by not supporting software updates on devices much older than 2 years, something unheard of with traditional computers in the past and completely unnecessary since most traditional apps simply don't need anywhere near the updated CPU power levels we're talking about and thus it's just a landfill WASTE. But then they proved that with batteries that cannot be changed by the user for no reason other than they want to "encourage" you to buy a newer device instead of a newer battery.
Right now, I can run Windows and OSX on the same machine and buy games on Steam and get both OS versions even, but change that ability and suddenly the Macintosh doesn't look so appealing anymore. It's obvious that Apple hopes to eventually merge the iOS and OSX lines (as I predicted several years ago) and most of their worthless OSX "upgrades" the past two years have been pushing in that direction despite what so many rabid fans claim to the contrary (and despite pointless thin 'upgrades' to the iMac that all point to them brainwashing you to accept them as one and the same device at some point).
Thus, one day you will find your iMac is just an iPad and that POWER USERS will be using another line of computers entirely. Imagine a world where criminals have computers that are 10-100x or more faster than what "typical consumers" use in the form of glorified iPads and the chaos that will inevitably ensue as the balance of power changes entirely. Oh poo on those horrible desktops. They're SOOOO unwieldy! My pocket iWallet is SO much better! What! My iWallet is empty! What happened!?!? (camera pan to snickering bad guy in the apartment next door who remotely hacked it).
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It's always power/performance. Are 4 ARM processors more power efficient for the same amount of work than one intel processor? Maybe, but probably not. This would only make sense for stuff where the only processing power required is equivalent to an ARM processor.
Not to mention, all the best fabs doing 22nm are making ivy bridge processors, not ARM processors. ARM processors tend to be still at 32nm.