Several years ago, Apple made the decision to change over from IBM"s PowerPC processors to Intel"s family of chips. Now comes word via unnamed sources that Apple may be making changes in its processor again at least for its laptops. SemiAccurate reports that the company is going to be moving its laptop products from Intel"s chips to one based on ARM"s designs. The article claims, "It won’t be really soon, but we are told it is a done deal."
The story claims that the move to the new processors won"t happen until sometime in 2013 which the article says the first fully 64-bit ARM processors should be in place. However another web site, MacRumors.com, is already putting out some doubts on if this will really happen. In its own coverage of the SemiAccurate rumors it writes, "While Apple did previously succeed in such a transition in the past with the PowerPC to Intel transition, it was not without an incredible amount of engineering to ease the process." A new move to ARM processors for Apple"s laptops would have to allow for some emulation of previously created software for the Mac OS, according to the story.
ARM has certainly generate a lot of news in recent months. Nvidia announced during the Consumer Electronics Show a few months ago that it would launch its first CPU using the ARM architecture. Microsoft also announced at that time that the next version of its Windows OS (Windows 8) will also run on ARM-based processors along with onces made by Intel and AMD.