Probably the new Elon Musk phone 🤥
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Apple Signs New Deal With Arm to License Chip Designs Beyond 2040
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I don't know how good the support is, but you can already run Linux on Apple Silicon, and the situation is only going to get better as the support improves and the number of mobile, home and server devices using ARM arch increases.
x86 isn't going away any time soon, or ever, but anywhere power efficiency is important (embedded, mobile, laptop, and many server/cloud use cases) it's losing the battle.
For example, there is still a metric ton of feature phones made and sold nowadays around the world, they use very basic/old chips as they require little processing power and they cost very little to make.
Is it not:
6502 (MOS) -> 68k (Motorola) -> PowerPC (IBM/Motorola) -> Intel -> ARM (Apple Silicon)
As long as ARM continues to innovate and avoid delays, I am confident in their future. I believe Apple has secured a contract with ARM to prevent the same issues that occurred with Intel/IBM. Remember G5?
Not for the Mac line. The 6502 and variants were the Apple][ and /// chips. The 68000 started with the Lisa.
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Speculating here, as I don't know of any specific smartphones that use these. Besides x86, my guess is there are some devices that use a MIPS processor. I think it's largely fallen out of favor, but MIPS used to be hot **** powering the N64, the first few Playstation consoles I believe, and I think even Tesla was using MIPS in their cars for a while.
Come on. USB-IF, all the IEEE standards like 802.11 (wifi) and 802.15 (bluetooth), HEVC, all the ANSI standards like HDMI. The big tech firms agree on plenty.
Having worked on a standards committee, the result is usually so broad to include all desired features to get “agreement” which means just because something complies with the standard means it will work with 2 different devices. Look at USB-C and RS -232 for example.
History repeats itself , didn’t arm start with the bbc micro ?
Probably got that wrong 😑
Probably got that wrong 😑
It was my understanding that Apple already had an essentially perpetual agreement with Arm. Anyone know what the prior arrangement was and what the details of this one might be?
Apple used the original ARM for the Newton too.
Yup. Full circle!!
Dang. 2040, so I guess apple is not going back to intel right?🤣
Only a guess, but maybe RISC-V? I read somewhere that Chinese tech companies are starting to embrace that architecture because of the various prohibitions imposed on the country by the "West" (mostly US).
"Arm's hardware underpins all of Apple's custom silicon processors" - is that actually accurate? ARM obviously doesn't produce any hardware and the article soon goes on to also say that Apple licensed the instruction set. I don't consider architectural designs nor instruction sets "hardware".
This leads me to my actual question: do Apple processors actually still have much ARM architectural content? Apple has been designing its own processors for a decade - I can't imagine them looking much like the ARM designs anymore. In other words, beyond the instruction set I can't believe Apple is using any ARM stuff anymore.
This leads me to my actual question: do Apple processors actually still have much ARM architectural content? Apple has been designing its own processors for a decade - I can't imagine them looking much like the ARM designs anymore. In other words, beyond the instruction set I can't believe Apple is using any ARM stuff anymore.
This is emblematic of most of America. Last updated thirty years ago.
For the Arm IPO, only 95.5 million American depositary shares will be listed for sale. SoftBank will still hold over a billion shares. In other words, SoftBank will control around 90.6% of Arm, so even if American tech companies buy up every single one of the 95.5 million shares, they won't hold enough shares to put through any changes at Arm (unless SoftBank starts dumping shares and their stake in Arm drops below 50% which I don't see happening any time soon)
SoftBank is only selling a minority share worth's of stock so even if Apple bought the entire block SoftBank would still control the bulk of the stock. So these companies are buying in more as a show of support than any strategic maneuver.
Apple's existing license for the current ARM instruction set is said to be a perpetual license so Apple can continue to develop SoCs for their products under that license forever. I presume this new license covers future ARM instruction sets and/or architectures should Apple chose to adopt them.
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Go spend. Support in Linux is already pretty good and getting better at a rapid clip.