Comments on: Apple ditching Intel for ARM in future MacBooks tip insiders

By: JP

JP — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:48:00 +0000

Crazy thought: Maybe Apple’s just going to do away with OS X altogether after Lion, and is going all-iOS across all form factors. Lion’s shaping up to be more and more iOS-like anyway. That would certainly support this rumor of the switch from Intel to ARM architecture…

By: JP

JP — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:48:00 +0000

By: Michael The Geek

Michael The Geek — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:41:00 +0000

Well.

By: Aston

Aston — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:36:00 +0000

It’s good move but in MacBook Air or another netbooks, but not in laptops beacus:
Tegra 2 has 37 MFLOPS
Atom 1.5GHz N550 has 6354 MFLOPS
Intel Core i5 480M has 29750 MFLOPS

FLoating point Operations Per Second

in my opinon is too soon to see ARM in laptops, beacause it have still too little power

By: Steven_katy

Steven_katy — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Yes,the apple macbook pro is really very wonderful. I also buy one latest Macbook pro i7 15.4 inch from http://www.ecgoon.com/Wholesale-macbook-pro_c6 in competitive price, it bring me a lot of fun and convenient, i like it very much.

By: First Name

First Name — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Without going into too much detail, it comes down to this: ARM processor designs are MUCH simpler than Intel’s Core i7. As a result, they consume a lot less power, but they are also MUCH less powerful on a clock-for-clock basis. A 1.6 GHz ARM is nearly an order of magnitude lower performance than a 1.6 GHz Core i7. ARM works for phones because people aren’t expecting massive performance on their tiny screens, but there’s a huge difference in expectations between a phone and a laptop. While ARM processors would work fine for web browsing and light word processing, don’t expect to see even World of Warcraft running on an ARM powered laptop.

For the record, I’m an electrical engineering graduate student that would love to work at ARM.

By: First Name

First Name — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:54:00 +0000

For the record, I’m an electrical engineering graduate student that would love to work at ARM.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:39:00 +0000

Like many here I call BS. While I could see the argument due to Apple’s desire to do everything they can in house (a vertical monopoly for those who care). It is not going to happen.

First of all on no level is the current ARM architecture better than Intel’s concurrent offering (both in power consumption and performance-research it first before arguing. eg see anandtech)

And second It would be extremely difficult to make it backwards compatible so software (and peripherals) purchased for OSX would be challenging and expensive to make work with the ARM architecture.

Third It would be expensive to convince Intel it was a good Idea to let them use their fabs to do it. See yesterdays rumor

Now that all being said, I could see Apple introducing a Transformer/netbook competitor that uses ARM.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:39:00 +0000

Like many here I call BS. While I could see the argument due to Apple’s desire to do everything they can in house (a vertical monopoly for those who care). It is not going to happen.

First of all on no level is the current ARM architecture better than Intel’s concurrent offering (both in power consumption and performance-research it first before arguing. eg see anandtech)

And second It would be extremely difficult to make it backwards compatible so software (and peripherals) purchased for OSX would be challenging and expensive to make work with the ARM architecture.

Third It would be expensive to convince Intel it was a good Idea to let them use their fabs to do it. See yesterdays rumor

Now that all being said, I could see Apple introducing a Transformer/netbook competitor that uses ARM.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:25:00 +0000

They have a different instruction set architecture, which is a fancy way of saying they speak a different language. On the more technical side, every processor has programming written in assembly which tells it how to handle certain strings of 1′s and 0′s, which allow it to denote what it needs to cache, what is going to the video card, what needs to be calculated and then fed to the video card etc. A combination of this programming and the way the individual transistors are laid down on the chip allows it to speak a specific language.

On a higher level, ARM licenses its architectures and designs, and others companies build them, but Intel both designs and builds it’s processor.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 06 May 2011 12:44:00 +0000

can anybody explain what is the difference between ARM and intel chips?

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:03:00 +0000

Take a look at the categories.

May 5, 2011 in Channel, Finance, Humor, Microprocessors, Mobile, Rumors

Seems someone submitted their april fools article more than a month late.

By: Average Joe

Average Joe — Fri, 06 May 2011 09:59:00 +0000

And while they’re at it, I speculate that they might ditch Mac OS as well, to run a glorified iOS over their whole product range.
That wouldn’t be good news for those who don’t like walled gardens.

By: Guest

Guest — Fri, 06 May 2011 09:58:00 +0000

One more reason not to buy overpriced MacBook AGAIN.

By: Rahul

Rahul — Fri, 06 May 2011 09:57:00 +0000

2013 is too far away. It certainly looks like Intel will have compelling offerings with the 3D (Tri-gate) transistors based Ivy bridge family of processors- The tri-gate transistor technology looks very promising, by the numbers that intel released- 50% lower power and 37% increased performance… That is bound to make Apple or anybody thinking to switch rethink.

2013 is way to ahead in time to make an accurate prediction, according to me.