

Be Inc. founder and former Apple employee Jean-Louis Gassée weighs in with his take on the recent announcement by Intel on the 3-D transistor technology as well as rumors that Apple might switch to ARM. Gassée spells out Intel's complete absence in the mobile market and how the 3-D transistor technology is supposed to address that, though he isn't particularly optimistic just based on the announcements alone:
As for Apple moving to ARM? Gassée simply doesn't see how ARM can fulfill Apple's high end system requirements:We’ll have to wait a year to see how this markitecture translates into actual devices. Wall Street didn’t pay much attention. We’ve been here before: The “product” of the announcement is the announcement. (And there’s the suspicion that “breakthrough” revelations are an attempt to mask a lack of spanking new products.)
Today, going ARM is technically feasible on entry-level Macs. Tomorrow, newer multicore ARM chips might work for middle-of-the-line Macintosh products. But will Apple abandon the faster x86 processors at the high end just to avoid the kind of forking that awaits Windows in its own move to ARM? If not, we’ll again see Universal applications (a.k.a. fat binaries–two versions inside the same container), just as we did with the PowerPC to x86 transition. Microsoft is doing it because it must; Apple did it because the PowerPC didn’t have a future. But now?
Article Link: Be Inc. Founder on Intel's 3-D Tech and Apple on ARM