Wow, I can't believe i made it through that entire painful thread. Quite a mixture of
opinions put out there. I'll add my own.
Apple is completely and utterly meaningless in the server and workstation market. HP, IBM, Dell - companies selling entire datacenters at a time far outweigh the 'desires' of Apple selling a few Mac Pros by comparison.
ARM is
everywhere, usually quietly doing it's job without anyone knowing or caring what CPU is being used, or if one is at all - the iPhones and iPads are ARM based (A4/A5), routers and switches, system management controllers or RAID systems, set top boxes, NAS boxes, in cars, in medical equipment - literally everywhere. Your new Android tablet with a Tegra in it? ARM based. That isn't to say there are no other chip families in use at all, but ARM is everywhere. Or almost - they're not in desktop or servers, but they're everywhere for various embedded type systems.
Intel by comparison doesn't do all that much outside of where it's core competency has been for a long time now - desktop, workstation and servers, laptops becoming more of a focus in recent years. If you search for 'intel embedded roadmap' what you'll find is the Atom roadmap. That's it.
Where Apple matters to Intel is in a few places - the first one is obvious, in the notebook area, and in marketing. Even if it's seen as 'negative' marketing when theres an occasional hiccup between Intel and Apple, don't think if Apple gave a viable alternative or moved off of Intel for the MBA and Pro lineup that others wouldn't take note and Intel wouldn't worry about the impact on their other, often larger customers, at least for laptops - HP, Dell, etc. The other part is Intel knows that laptops are not the
only target in 'mobile.' They haven't done overly well historically in gaining real market in all of the places ARM and others have, but tablets are doing some interesting things lately, and it doesn't take a crystal ball to see the overlap and/or convergence with laptops. Laptops are taking over for yesterdays workstations, tablets are doing more and potentially displacing netbooks, but Atom is mostly left in the cold as tablets are using Tegras or other ARM based chips. Today's tablets are tomorrows calculators as one potential path, and Intel would love to expand their horizons in that direction, instead of having someone scale upwards at the time when tablets or another mobile device is replacing laptops of today.
Everyone being 'surprised' by Windows or OSX running on ARM - why? iOS runs on it, Windows NT used to also run on DEC Alpha, PPC, MIPS, and..ARM (may be missing others but irrelevant). Why? It's not because MS thinks that tomorrow the world is going to discard their current high performance workstations, servers or notebooks with x86 inside and replace them with ARM based systems. It's about mobility. Smartphones just recently outsold the number of PCs shipped in a year, and that along with other mobile devices, is a trend likely to continue. Windows hasn't exactly been winning in the smartphone or mobility market, has it? Hint - nope, Windows isn't a top contender on phones today, far behind even RIM, and tablets? At best 5% or so. Random links, but google 'windows < mobile | tablet > market share' if you want more..
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/08/11/windows-phone-7-global-market-share-dips-below-bada/
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft...-to-equalize-with-little-help-from-windows-7/
Gartners numbers are even lower than the above, with MS about to fall into 'Other OS' category..
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1689814
The point? It's not about ARM giving us a workstation or even high end notebook class CPU to compete with Intel any time soon - it may happen in the future, but as pointed out, as ARM scales 'upwards,' it may or may not be competitive vs current gen Intel. Apple may well 'help' push that along, in the desire for faster iPads/iDevices, but unless Apple is going to try to solidify some peoples opinions about the Air being 'an iPad with a keyboard,' I don't think it's likely to even see in an Air any time soon. There's not anywhere to go at that performance level in the near future besides AMD, which you can bet has likely been used as another 'threat' to Intel...unless of course, Apple has quietly been continuing to have it's PA Semi (PPC) purchase somehow continue down it's former path - pretty unlikely, IMO.
Of course, from the 'bad side', someone mentioned this one up-thread and it's interesting, but would entirely fail it's 'power' users - it's not impossible to see Apple try to offload processing power to the cloud. Appstore to buy your apps, iCloud to host them AND execute them, and then all you'd need is a moderately fast way to transfer the results (Internet), and a moderately fast display (phone/tablet/laptop/desktop/display). That might be a direction Apple would like to head in, but it's not there yet. Could convergence between IOS and OSX be a step in that direction? Sure, but I don't think Apple's got much of a threat to move Mac Pros or MBPs to ARM any year soon, nor do most people have reliable and fast enough Internet connections to offload entirely to the cloud (not to mention lack of willingness to). That might not stop Apple from moving a lower end Air in that direction, though, and being able to move to ARM if it does prove to be 'fast enough' at some future date.
