Apple made the transition from PowerPC to Intel based processors in their Mac line in January of 2006. This move was hard on many of the Apple faithful who had been extolling the superiority of the PowerPC based Macs for years. While the PowerPC is a much more elegant design it was also rapidly falling behind Intel's X86 based architecture in many areas. Apple has seen substantial sales growth since this transition for several reasons, not the least of which was that porting code from Windows based PC's to Apple MacOS based computers running Intel processors was much easier. Keep that in mind when evaluating the chances that Apple will switch to ARM. ARM is a great architecture in the mobile space, it is not ready for prime time in the desktop and server market at this time.
It is true that Microsoft has announced support for ARM in Windows 8, but so far as I can tell they haven't uttered a single word that would indicate they are going to drop support for X86 based processors. Given this my initial reaction to the rumor was to guffaw. Then I did a bit of research and decided a bemused grin might be more appropriate response.
The primary reason I didn't initially put any credence in this rumor is that I thought ARM was missing two pieces of functionality that are vital in non mobile computing platforms.
- Support for Virtualization
- 64 bit instructions set
It turns out that item one is in fact a part of the ARM Cortex A-15 architecture announced last September and that item number two is currently being worked on by NVidia as part of their project Denver.
So far as I can tell nobody has announced an implementation of ARM that supports both virtualization and a 64 bit architecture but it seems credible that such a processor could be available in the next few years.
Why are these features important? Processors that provide virtualization functionality can be efficiently time sliced into multiple virtual processors. This capability provides two main advantages. In the server space processors historically ran at 10% or less average utilization. Time slicing the processors in a server allows companies to fully utilize the hardware they've invested in because they can run as many virtual servers as they need to in order to push the utilization of their available resource as close to 100% as they want. Virtualization can also be used to create a "sandbox" that can run codes more securely by isolating them in their own virtual machine.
In the case of 64 bit processors you gain two things. The ability to process data twice as fast and the ability to utilize much larger amounts of addressable main memory which is especially important to servers and high end workstations.
So what about the rumors that Intel wants to put some of their foundry capacity to work for Apple? That makes a lot of sense. I'm not an engineer and the kinds of technologies used to fabricate processors and other silicon based products fall well outside of my day job but two things are clear. One, Apple is selling a lot of hardware and Intel would no doubt love to get a bit more of the revenues that are being generated by those sales. The second important consideration is that Intel arguably has the best semiconductor process technology in the world. Their recent announcement of a viable commercial process to create 3D transistors is going to allow for significant reductions in power consumption and increases in speed. Industry analysts believe Intel is two years or more ahead of their competition. So, if you're Apple why wouldn't you be interested in working with Intel if the price is right? Ironically this may mean Intel ends up producing ARM architecture processors.
This wouldn't be Intel's first foray into manufacturing silicon for others. In late 2010 they announced a partnership with startup Achronix to manufacture Field Programmable Gate Arrays using Intel's 22nm process.
So in summary, while Apple is not going to switch to ARM in the next two years they might just be able to make that leap some day in the not too distant future and when they do it is possible that Intel will be making those processors. Sound a little far fetched? Perhaps, but if ARM continues to evolve and move up market Intel's going to have a lot of excess capacity and shrinking revenues. Smart companies adapt in those kinds of scenarios.
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