Apple may have acquired ARM design firm

The ATV desperately needs an ARM overhaul or if they get TV subscriptions on the iPad, it can replace it. I really hope that over the next few years there's not going to be some major transition to it though. They're low power cores and you'd fit maybe 40 x 2GHz cores into the same power envelope as a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo if it scales up linearly.

ARM performs like the Atom according to the spec so a 1GHz ARM is slower than a 1.6GHz Atom by about 60% but given that a dual 1.6GHz Atom is 1/3 the speed of a 2GHz Core 2 Duo (25% slower per clock), 40 x 2GHz ARM Cores would perform like a 32-core Intel chip but only using the power of a dual-core Intel chip.

It's interesting but worrying at the same time. I really don't want to go through yet another major software transition and lose x86 compatibility. I guess at that speed you can virtualize Windows just fine and they might even manage to virtualize the GPU for games but it would be a massive headache.

Can you imagine if that's what the Macbook Pro delay's been for. Last revision you had 2 x 2.5GHz Intel cores, now the new MBP has 20 x 2GHz ARM cores and lasts 10 hours and because it's ARM, you get Cocoa Touch apps native and a multi-touch screen. Then a new gold-rush for Mac apps.

The thing that annoys me most about this idea is I'm not sure whether to love it or hate it. If it stops me playing great Windows games and run certain types of software, I would hate it but if it makes video encoding, calculations and rendering run nearly 20x faster than what Intel offer then I'd love it.

I just read that again this morning and it took on a different meaning.


It's all down to performance-per-watt though:

http://www.greenm3.com/2009/09/arm-p...e-designs.html

"Cambridge, England-based chip company ARM on Wednesday announced the development of dual-core, quad-core, and eight-core Cortex A9 processor designs, explicitly aimed at markets currently served by Intel's x86 chips and IBM's PowerPC.

"This is a huge departure from what we've done in the past", Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM's processor division, told ZDNet UK. "We really wanted to take off the handcuffs and see what could be done with performance, performance, performance."

"the new processors, which can run at up to 2GHz, are up to eight times more efficient than Intel's low-power chips in terms of performance per watt"

Not quite the 20x I suggested but 8x is still very significant. Apple could start with their servers, where the low power consumption and less need for cooling with have serious cost benefits. If the servers worked out, you know they'd move it to the desktop eventually.

It's quite proven when you find out a number of members of the staff now work for Apple - as of very recently.

The price/power/performance balance of chips running the ARM architecture seems a very nice fit for small mobile devices right now. It's interesting that Apple hasn't tried to acquire ARM Holdings yet, with their market cap. of £3B

Well, TheRegister is suggesting they may be...

Seems like an odd mix to me, and likely to get a whole lot of scrutiny...