Death knell for the Wintel PC

“The breathlessly exciting, seemingly endless stream of announcements from the Consumer Electronics Show in January, detailing the latest in 3D TVs, me-too tablets and televisions that will run apps, may have caused you to miss the most significant development of all: the death of the Wintel PC,” Kenny Hemphill writes for MacUser.

“The irony for Mac users is that in a few years’ time Macs could still be using Intel processors, while PCs will be using chips designed by ARM, a company co-founded by Apple,” Hemphill writes.

MacDailyNews Take: Don’t bet on that, Kenny. In a few years time, many Windows PCs will still be using Intel processors in a few years time.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]

32 Comments

  1. As far as I know the Death Knell for Apple has been going strong since 1995, and Apple’s still here. Besides it isn’t as if the PC industry is going to flip a switch and convert to a new chip overnight.

    Intel isn’t going to struggle forever to build a decent mobile chipset. In fact, they could shave years off the task if they’d only reverse engineer Apple’s design.

    In the meantime, PC makers will continue to build more powerfull desktops and so will Apple.

  2. And here I was thinking that it’s just a matter of time until Apple brings all their CPU operations in-house and builds A4-like processors for everything they make. Why is it assumed that they would be left behind after making an incredible chip (almost no heat!) for their tablets and phones?

  3. Any developer can tell you that iOS runs on both Intel and ARM – the iPhone/iPad emulator (virtual machine) is Intel based, not ARM.

    Apple has invested a lot in LLVM, which allows for processor independent code generation. In the near future, it won’t matter what processors are used all Apple needs to do is add LLVM translators for whatever is being used.

    Which will lead to applications that can run on a variety of different systems. Apple has also lead developers down the path of being able to morph their application interfaces to the device being used; iPhone or iPad, Lion full screen mode and regular windowed mode.

    Imagine a single application with all three UIs; pocket UI (iPod/iPhone), full screen UI (iPad/Lion Full Screen mode), and desktop UI (Lion Window Mode).

  4. Its actually that windows will still use intel and macs use ARM. As Steve Jobs wants the mac to be more like the ipad and iphone with faster startup, lower power processors, easy to use, will just means the laptops in a few years time will be running ARMS long before Windows PC ever does touch ARM processors.

  5. The ARM Cortex A15 can’t get here fast enough. TI’s OMAP5 is prepping samples using the ARM A15 cores, to ship by the end of the year. They are predicting phones using the chips to be ready by 2nd half of 2012.

    The ARM A15 cores are supposed to run at 2Ghz, giving 3x the speed of the 1Ghz A9 core. At 1Ghz it’s supposed to be 50% faster than a 1Ghz A9.

    It’s supposed to support up to 4 cameras, which means you could possibly shoot in 3d. Or I supposed you could create an HDR with one simultaneous exposure instead of several in sequence, the way the iPhone does it now. Or I suppose you could create an awesome bokeh by focusing the lenses differently. I don’t know, but it sounds interesting.

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