[raverbashing]

Still to be confirmed, I don't usually take "analyst predictions" too seriously but I found this interesting:

"Apple will no longer be held to the whims of Intel"

Apple switched to Intel because IBM couldn't ship a good enough G5 for notebooks and for scale issues. Given that Intel is not on track with 7nm and rumours of their CEO being seen in Taiwan the other day it seems history is repeating itself.

[philwelch]

It’s not just that IBM couldn’t ship a mobile-friendly G5, but that Motorola couldn’t ship any improvement over the G4 fast enough because laptops were an afterthought for their primarily embedded-centric business.

Intel is one of two suppliers for nearly every laptop CPU sold today. If Apple was just disappointed with Intel they could switch to AMD instead. Either way they wouldn’t fall behind the rest of the personal computer market as they were at the end of the PPC era.

Instead, they’re making basically the same bet they made with PowerPC—that a different CPU architecture can significantly outperform x86. Last time, it turned out that Intel and AMD, by focusing on the PC market, could keep up with and ultimately outperform Motorola, since Motorola was more focused on embedded systems. This time, it’s Apple producing the chips, except Apple themselves are also more focused on mobile devices than they are on personal computers. So it will be interesting to see if this bet pays off this time around.

[DeathArrow]

There's also VIA making x86 CPUs and some chinese companies on collaboration with AMD.

[caycep]

It goes w/ the core Jobs/Cook strategy of owning/controlling all their core tech.

(notwithstanding their core "supply chain tech" as per Ben Thompson's point on Stratechery).

The other thought...is it yet another loss of American technical expertise that they cannot chip fab w/ the best of them anymore?

[unlinked_dll]

I mean if it's just about performance, why switch architectures instead of using AMD chips?

[oefrha]

Alan Kay: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

Apple: People who are really serious about hardware make their own processors.

[birdyrooster]

Eventually you become Ford and build a River Rouge Plant where you do all of your own metallurgy and parts manufacturing. Completely vertical.

[dylan604]

If it's time to make another CPU change, why not switch it to one that you control completely? Motorola->PPC->Intel->Apple. It just makes sense that's where they'd ultimately want to go.

[Hamuko]

>why not switch it to one that you control completely?

So you don't have to kill all of the software currently running on your customers' machines.

[dylan604]

Rumors were that from the first days of OS X, there was a skunk works level group at Apple ensuring Darwin compiled on Intel chips with an eye on being able to make the switch. I wouldn't place bets against the same thing being in place with ARM chips especially with Apple's ownership in the chips.

[scarface74]

It worked out well the previous two times.

I bought a PPC Mac 9 months after they first made the switch. Most of my software was already native. Within the next year, all of the important software was native.

[unlinked_dll]

There's a lot of creative software that didn't survive the ppc switch. Back then the chasm between MacOS and Windows for certain workloads was a mile wide and despite all the software lost, which would never be recompiled, users stayed with it.

With recent changes to the OS, a decade of instability with every update every year, the recent hard deprecation of 32 bit binaries, and now moving to an unproven ISA for those particular workloads - all while Windows and Linux have closed the gap, mostly... the situation is a bit different.

[scarface74]

This is not going to be the year of the Linux Desktop. What creative software got left behind during either transition? ARM is not an “unproven ISA”. Both Microsoft and Adobe already have ARM versions because of iPads. Besides, unlike the 68K transition, the amount of assembly code in most applications are small

[egypturnash]

Both previous switches were fast enough that an emulation layer could get most legacy stuff running at a decent speed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the same went for this one. We did just have the 64-bit apocalypse though.

[birdyrooster]

I agree completely. It’s also the case that ARM core performance is now close to parity with x86. With a little more time, the arm performance curve will poke out above x86 and it will be the perfect time to adopt arm for desktop.

[DeathArrow]

Proof?

[avelis]

I remember rewatching the switch to Intel being for performance per watt. Intel was way better at that metric than G4 or even trying to get a G5 into a notebook. Maybe ARM can finally achieve the suitable performance per watt they are looking for.

[saagarjha]

Kuo is extremely good with supply chain rumors.