“You have to wonder if Apple and Intel are in some kind of negotiation phase right now,” Arik Hesseldahl writes for AllThingsD. “That’s one cynical way to interpret the story from Bloomberg News saying that Apple is exploring ways to move its Macintosh line of computers away from Intel’s chips and toward using its own internally designed line of chips.”
“Such a change would no doubt hurt Intel, already fighting to maintain its spot as one of the tech industry’s agenda-setting companies as the PC market contracts, and its lack of participation in the mobile market becomes ever more glaring,” Hesseldahl writes. “The thinking goes that in time Apple will want to offer a more unified computing environment across all of its platforms — phones, tablets and PCs — and one key way to make that happen is to have a single chip architecture inside them all.”
Hesseldahl writes, “It isn’t crazy, and you just know that somewhere in some lab in Cupertino or Austin there is a hopped-up prototype Mac running some weird iteration of OS X on some hopped-up prototype A-Chip, just to see if it can be done. As the late Steve Jobs once said about the prospect of switching to Intel but before it happened: ‘We like to have options.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Apple exploring switch from Intel processors for Macintosh, say sources – November 5, 2012
iPad 4 graphics upgrade a serious horsepower increase; Apple’s A6X is one massive processing machine – November 2, 2012
Benchmarks: Apple iPad 4′s A6X beats all comers in GPU performance – November 2, 2012
Apple’s powerful A6 a unique CPU design that’s never been seen before – October 8, 2012
Analysis of Apple A6 core reveals exquisite, optimized custom layout done by hand – September 26, 2012
Apple A6 die reveals 3-core GPU – September 21, 2012
iPhone 5′s A6 SoC SunSpider performance fastest ever recorded on a smartphone – September 19, 2012
Apple’s custom A6 processor the result of years of effort, including a $500 million chip development program – September 18, 2012
A6 is Apple’s first with custom-designed CPU cores; iPhone 5 memory size and speed revealed – September 16, 2012
