Sam Oliver
Asked about ARM and Apple's potential use of its A series of ARM processors in future MacBooks, Greg Welch, director of Intel's Ultrabook group, told CNet News.com that the chip maker is taking the threat seriously, and hopes to continue to innovate its way into Apple's product portfolio.
"We hear the same rumors and it would be remiss of us to be dismissive," he said. "We endeavor to innovate so they'll continue to look to us as a supplier."
The comment, which came at the end of a Q&A session on Intel's fledgeling Ultrabook slim notebook initiative, appears to lend support to claims from a few months ago that Apple built a test Thunderbolt MacBook Air around the same A5 chip found in the iPad 2 and found that the system performed "better than expected."
For Apple, a move away from generally-available, off-the-shelf CPUs and towards its own breed of proprietary designs would not only afford it more control over product release schedules and its intellectual property, but it would also pave the way for the Mac maker to introduce new patent-protected features on its Mac line that rivals would have trouble reproducing for their own designs.
Similarly, the company wouldn't need to compete with competitors for its supply of processors and would have more flexibility to fine-tune battery and overall performance, delivering even more of the features to the Mac line that have seen its iOS devices top the ranks of consumer satisfaction surveys for years.
Through its acquisitions of Intrinsity and P.A. Semi, Apple last year introduced the its first ARM-based A-series chip — the A4 — inside its iPad and iPhone 4. It then rapidly followed up earlier this year with the iPad 2's ">A5-chip
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Andrew O'Hara
130 Comments
No more BootCamp ?
While this would undoubtably increase the efficiency of the macbook computers it would also alienate millions of us that still on a rare occasion have to run windows. I probably only spend about 10% of my time using windows but there are still things that I have to have it for. If apple went to a proprietary chip myself, and I am sure millions of others would be stuck going back to windows only PCs.
I'm worried about the implications this would cause for installing windows on a mac computer. I'm all for it though, Apple has some really talented people that can probably produce a laptop class processor with the power performances of a mobile processor.
Not to mention, in my humble opinion, the iPad pc's are testament to Apple putting their design theories in the real world, the performance of the iPad computers are very good, and Apple will continue to scale and design them to be on par with desktop class chips. Why not use them to replace their chips found in macbooks.
I hope Apple can succeed in creating their own chips, only if the performance of the machines are better than if they used chips from other manufacturers. Without better performance the Apple products will start to lag behind other manufacturers, which wouldn't be good for the future of Apple.
I hope they decide to build their chips in the USA.
No more BootCamp ?
He did say 'some of the Macs'. It would make sense for Apple to keep some Intel based Macs but the vast majority of users don't want Windows. Having said that I'd hope VMWare could come up with a VM for the new CPU for at the very least OS X itself as it has now on Intel (if not iOS in a VM ... might be fun - kind of like the iOS SDK).
The extra control, tight integration and heck, profits, make this a no brainer for at least some Macs or 'other' Apple product yet to be revealed IMHO.