You"ve probably heard this before, but Apple is reportedly preparing to launch new Mac devices powered by ARM-based chipsets at some point next year. This kind of rumor has been going around for years now, and it was last reported just two months ago, when analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made the same prediction yet again.
Now, a new report from Bloomberg is backing up that claim, saying that Apple is preparing a total of three processors of its own to power the Mac family. The chipsets will apparently be based on the Apple A14, which should be the chip inside the upcoming iPhone models for 2020. They will be based on a 5nm process and produced by TSMC. The company is also already working on the next generation of ARM processors, based on the 2021 iPhone chipset.
According to the sources, Apple is planning to launch at least one Mac device with ARM chipsets next year, but the company would most likely transition the entire lineup over time. The transition would start with the cheaper models, since it"s harder to match the performance of Intel"s higher-tier processors on the more expensive Macs.
The first ARM processors for Mac are expected to have 12 cores, eight of them for high-performance tasks and four efficient cores, for less intensive tasks that run in the background, for example. In the future, that core count could go up, but for many MacBook models, this would already be a significant bump.
Of course, 2021 is still a ways off, and even if the report is accurate, there"s always a chance things could change before then. After all, we"ve been hearing about this change for a while now and it has yet to materialize.