As we reported earlier this week, often reliable KGI is predicting that Apple will bring its in-house designed A-series processor to an entry-level Mac sometime in 2016 with TSMC and Samsung expected to fab the potential A9X and A10X chips, respectively. As the move to put non-Intel chips in the Mac lineup would be a departure for the company, CNBC asked Intel CEO Brian Krzanich about the chip-maker’s business plans with Apple…
Unsurprisingly, Krzanich defended Intel’s relationship with Apple despite expectations of the company designing its own chips for upcoming Macs.
When asked if he has heard anything to the effect of Apple not using Intel chips for its notebook line down the road or had specific discussions on the topic, Krzanich dismissed the notion as persistent rumors declaring that Intel’s “relationship with Apple is strong.”
“Apple is always going to choose the supplier who can provide them the most amount of capability and innovation for them to build on, for them to innovate. They’re a company based on innovation. So our job is to continue to deliver parts that have that capability, that are better than our competitors, and then they want to use our parts.”
Krzanich went on to dismiss the effect news of a potential switch from Intel by Apple had on its stock price earlier in the week. KGI did, however, include Intel as an additional baseband supplier in 2016 adding to Apple’s mix of providers.
As we reported earlier this week, the KGI prediction wording describes an Apple-designed A-series chip with processing power between an Atom and Core i3 chip. That processing power sits on the entry-level end of Apple’s notebook lineup suggesting the A-series chip departure from Intel will likely be saved for a future version of Apple’s upcoming 12-inch MacBook Air.
You can watch the video below of Intel’s CEO discussing the Apple chip news:
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There seem to be a lot of people that think they know why Apple cannot or would not transition to their own custom silicon, when the time is right.
Having read a lot of it, I’m even more convinced that Apple is working on making that possible, and they themselves see it happening in about two years time.
Here’s why I doubt it will happen.
1. ARM chips are RISC, Intel chips are CISC. They would have to port (again) OS X and all of the apps over to RISC, when Apple already went through that headache when they moved from PowerPC to X86.
2. They won’t be able to run Windows or Linux and their respective apps.
3. Thunderbolt support might be a consideration since Apple chooses the Intel chipsets that supports Thunderbolt, which is Intel technology.
Moving OS X to ARM chips would just be another nightmare Apple doesn’t need. I doubt there is any upside to it, only plenty of downsides. ARM chips for Apple are for mobile devices such as iDevices/Wearables, AppleTV.
To follow up Rich’s comments, how would Apple even be able to find the additional manufacturing capacity to add another Ax machine. They can’t keep up with iPhone orders. Another Ax machine would mean that they are stealing capacity away from the iPhone. I think this rumor is bogus. Chances are that Apple is working on a processor that greatly improves over the A9 for a pro iPad.
RISC/CISC are design philosophies. ARM and x86 (and PowerPC, and SPARC, etc) are architectures. While they initially were designed at each end of the spectrum, they have borrowed design concepts from each other over the years.
Your points remain valid reasons not to change architectures, though. To add to them:
High-end Macs would likely need to keep x86 chips for a while, resulting in fragmentation unless developers adopt “Universal” app creation (again).
Here’s what I think is more plausible. They are more likely going to add more features to iOS to make it more full function like OS X, but without everything that OS X does and they’ll just be adding more features to iOS that are more suited to mobile devices, etc. but still running iOS apps. I can see iOS becoming more fully functional as well since the h/w has more processing power. So an iPad will become a platform for powerful apps that might rival the power of desktop/laptop apps, but just a simplified handheld mobile version of it for those that prefer the smaller form factor. But I highly doubt it will eliminate the traditional desktop/laptop platform.
Apple ARM based SoC won’t be on par with Intel CPUs in 1-2 years. Not even in 4-5 years. Maybe 8-10years at the current pace.
Apple doesn’t have the resources right now to design and build CPUs on par with Intel Xeon. And as long as they won’t be able to do that, create their own CPUs for Mac Pro too then they won’t be able to switch OSX again to another architecture.
OSX will keep running on Intel CPUs for many years.
However Apple might try released an hybrid iPad Pro with just ARM SoC and a recompiled OSX version along with an emulator to run x86/x64 binaries. But in such a case then that ARM SoC would need to be run at 3GHz at least to deliver a good usable performance.
I agree. It’s not the first time that we heard rumor about an ARM based Mac. Switching to a new architecture maybe a longrun strategy of Apple, but not now. There might be an new version of OSX for the rumored iPad Pro.
If anything, Apple is more likely to switch their mobile devices to Intel, because they fully control the distribution of apps for those and thus they are able to do binary translation on their servers to avoid most compatibility issues