jose (1.delete@this.2.com) on September 23, 2013 4:43 am wrote:
> A while ago Charlie Demerjian was almost eaten alive when he stated that
> Apple wanted/was planning to migrate to ARM for their laptop/desktop products.
> Is it a coincidence that Apple is the first one with an ARM64 chip?


That doesn't mean they will be putting it in a desktop computer. Certainly they could migrate the Air and Mini, neither of which have performance as their main selling point. But the Macbook Pro and the desktop Pro? Both are sold on the basis of performance, and it would fall well short on ARM unless Apple has them working on a non-mobile ARM variant. Such a chip still would be unlikely to keep up with Intel, due to their process advantage alone if nothing else, but could certainly be as competitive as AMD is were Apple serious about it. As Mark pointed out, however, they'd also lose the ability to run boot Windows which is a capability that helps sell some Macs to customers who would otherwise have no choice but to choose a PC due to software/work requirements.

I still think we'll see the ability to connect a phone to a monitor/keyboard/mouse and when so connected it will run the OS X GUI. The OS X build tools would add a checkbox to compile a fat binary for x86 & ARM. When I've posted about this before I said the first piece they'd need would be a 64 bit ARM (because you don't want to target this at 32 bit and soon after force a migration) I didn't think that would come quite so quickly. The 5S probably won't be the first device that does this, because it only has 1GB of RAM which is likely not enough (though I suppose if any other running iPhone apps are paged out the OS X GUI could fit in that amount of RAM) More likely to happen with iPhone 6 next year, and they'll use the 5S over the year for testing and refinement of this capability. I really believe this is coming, it just makes too much sense not to do it.

If I'm right, that could be where Charlie got the 'ARM on desktop' from. It isn't as if he's got a Snowden type who is dumping him a few gigabytes of files with Apple's future product plans. He probably hears a whisper here, a rumor there, learns some other unrelated pieces and then puts it all together. Maybe when he has a fully formed hypothesis he directly asks a contact at Apple "will Apple do ARM on the desktop" and he's told they will. He's just not told the form that it will take...