[skimbrel]

If this is true, I have to start wondering whether Apple plans to port OS X to ARM. Granted, they’d probably have to evolve ARM into a 64-bit architecture, but the power savings would be incredible. A MacBook Air with the battery life of an iPad 2.

(We already know Apple is more than capable of executing CPU transitions on the Mac. I suppose the only other question is how much people value Parallels and Boot Camp.)

[phillmv]

They already did all the ground work when they forked OSX into iOS, and they're notoriously paranoid about keep their options open. I bet you they already have those prototypes lying around – but the economics won't make sense for another five years.

[wavephorm]

No way it'll take 5 years to move to ARM. I bet we'll see ARM Macbook Airs by the end of next year.

Here's what I think will happen - the Macbook Pro line will be slimmed down to Air specs, the Air that exists today gets discontinued to make way for an all-ARM version.

The Air brand will be the ARM laptop line, the Macbook Pro's will be x86 for a few years before they too switch.

[danssig]

>the Macbook Pro line will be slimmed down to Air specs

Wow, I hope not. Right now I use MBP as a desktop replacement. I've been able to get away with that so far because the iMac isn't normally dramatically far ahead of the 17".

[ams6110]

The heavy lifting was done decades ago by NeXT. They had NEXTSTEP running on different architectures, even different endian ones, in the 1990s. I'm guessing they already have OSX running on ARM in the lab.

[Geee]

I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled out a high-performance ARM chip (more cores) to completely replace x86. Someone's got to do it, right? Windows 8 is also headed in this direction with support for both ARM and x86, but all current ARM-chips are low-power low-performance and can't compete with x86.

[skimbrel]

We can only hope. x86 has so much backwards-compatibility baggage at this point — it’s too complex for its own good and all that extra silicon is just a power drain.

[wanorris]

It's worth remembering that this has traditionally been offset by the fact that x86 chips are manufactured in such epic volumes and on such advanced processes that there was no way for more "efficient" silicon to dislodge it.

And unlike the transition from Power chips to x86, ARM won't be so much faster that something like Rosetta will be a workable transition solution for real applications -- effectively everything will have to be ported, or it won't work.

The epic volumes of ARM chips make it possible to overcome the manufacturing and scale issues, but doing complex super-custom ARM chips for PCs drops the chips back out of the mass market again unless an enormous number of PCs get converted all at once -- though this is something Apple is capable of.

Overall, there are enough logistic issues involved that I'm not convinced that ARM is the future of PCs unless the current ARM devices like iPads and Android tablets grow up to be our PCs of the future.

[loup-vaillant]

While we're at it, why not jettison the whole paradigm, and start over? ARM itself is getting quite complicated, and there are ideas to be picked from, say, the B5000, or Transmeta.