So you don't believe Apple is testing OS X on ARM in their labs in anticipation for future ARM chips that might be powerful enough to meet their needs?
If I understood your post correctly, you were saying that for ARM to design a chip that had the equivalent processing power of an Intel chip, it would lose its edge in energy efficiency. I would argue that 1) we won't know until they do and 2) even if what you're saying turns out to be true (that at the equivalent processing power, ARM=Intel in energy efficiency), using ARM chips still has a cost advantage over Intel.
ARM has already tried to create a CPU that has the equivalent processing power of an Intel chip - the A15. As they scaled up in performance and faced the same realities of power/performance and lost their energy efficiency edge. ARM power on A15 is way higher than Intel for the same performance level. ARM tried to remediate this with Big.Little, but we have yet to see if it works (meanwhile it takes a lot of space to put two separate (A15 and A7) cores on the same die). I think that's why Samsung went with Intel instead of Big.Little on ARM and why Apple did a custom design instead of using A15. Good point about cost though.
We are all sure they are but by the time ARM catches up to Intels CPU performance there is also just as likely a chance for Intel to catch up to ARM's power consumption performance.
They've already caught up on power. The new Silvermont CPU Intel announced is even more power efficient (better performance using less power). Of course the mainstream Intel CPUs (like what's in the Surface Pro) uses more power, but ARM isn't competing there yet.
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Yes, so you agree that ARM designs could ramp up the performance to equal or surpass Intel. Now factor in a couple of other facts:
- Apple already has a team of engineers who now have at least several years experience designing ARM chips. The benefits then extend to the possibility of optimizing their chip designs to the OS or vice versa.
- Designing it themselves, paying a small licensing fee to ARM, and having them built by a foundry like TSMC, GF, or even Samsung is MUCH cheaper than buying chips from Intel
I would argue that ARM designs can't match Intel performance without completely losing their power efficiency advantage. The A15 is an example of that. They still have a ways to go.
Apple CPU team is really impressive though. Isn't it amazing that a group of engineers at Apple (mainly from PA Semi) are able to make a better ARM CPU than ARM??
I think ARM messed up with A15, and they are trying to fix it with the A12 they announced yesterday (which is essentially an A6X). The A12 won't be ready for over a year though, which is why Apple, Qualcomm, and others have been doing their own chip designs based on ARM.
Agree though that Apple probably would prefer to do their own chips than pay for Intel prices. However, they don't want to give money to their competition (Samsung) or have a huge drop in performance per watt and compatibility loss by switching to ARM in the Mac line. I really don't see any advantage in switching to ARM for Macs except that they would want to "control" it. But I also don't see them going out and making displays and other components. They compete with experiences, software, industrial design.
