Intel partner Altera announced at the ARM developers' conference yesterday that the world's largest semiconductor chip maker will start manufacturing 64-bit ARM chips beginning in 2014,
This is kind of a "so what?" There needs to be more sources for ARM parts because the demand is going up and Chipzilla wants a bite of that. This just makes logical sense. It's not like Intel hasn't done it before. (They last did it when PDA's were a thing, you all remember PDA's right? Basically what Smartphones evolved from.)
Apple was also originally rumored in 2011 to be
moving from Intel's x86 architecture to ARM processors in future laptops, with a
report in November 2012 also stating that Apple was considering the switch from Intel chips. A
closer look at the potential move determined that Apple's potential shift from x86 to ARM for Macs was not implausible, as Apple could theoretically push ARM's power efficient based chips to become more suitable for its line of desktops and notebooks.
Every time I see this rumor I roll my eyes. This is business people speculating because they don't understand the underlying effort required. When Apple switched from 68K to PPC, they had backwards compatibility in mind. When they switched from PPC to x86, that choice was because the parts were too expensive and non-competitive. Apple does not need to switch from x86 in the desktop/laptops, because there is nothing to be gained. As much as people slam Intel for producing expensive furnaces for CPU parts, they keep on reducing the power usage with every generation. ARM parts however are not (If anything they're staying the same.)
Intel want's to see it's x86 parts in every device because it owns that IP. However x86 will max out around 12nm which means in less than 4 years we'll hit a plateau where there is no return on investment from trying to shrink it down further. Apply this to ARM parts which have a more power efficient design to begin with and you see why Intel has jumped on this bandwagon now. Eventually there may be a reason for Microsoft, Apple, Linux, etc to all switch to ARM parts for portable devices, because of wholesale abandonment of the x86 architecture, but I don't see this happening unless no further power/performance can be squeezed out of x86.
I think what we will see on a laptop or desktop is not a switch from x86, but rather ARM chips appearing first as additional CPU/GPU's (iPhone CPU's reportedly cost around 20$) and then the x86 CPU appearing as the additional CPU later, with lower-cost models not having the x86 parts. This would explain the feature stripping of the Apple owned software to make it similar to the iOS versions.
You all have noticed that most of the time the CPU meter on your desktops and laptops is near 8% or less right? The x86 core is probably overkill for just web browsing. The ARM part could make everything run silent until needed.
