That Apple is moving the chopsticks under the cloth so that, in the not too distant future, its line of Macs transition from Intel chips to proprietary processors, with architecture ARM, nothing new. What nobody knows for sure when this happens: it may be tomorrow, it may be five years from now, or it may be in the next 12 to 18 months, as Ming-Chi Kuo said.
Because second Jean-Louis Gasse, head of development for the Macintosh division between 1981 and 1990, the time now: ARM chips, according to the executive, already have sufficient conditions to equip the entire line of Macs currently existing and to match the power offered by Intel processors. Yes: according to him, this includes even the superpowered Mac Pro.
Such a statement would already be important in any case, considering Gasse's stature and its importance for the development of the Mac; it becomes even more remarkable when we remember that the same Gasse had, for more than a year, considered this possibility a “fantasy”. In a 2019 article, he stated that abandoning Intel “would make little practical sense” and would be “very complicated”, especially since, in his view at the time, ARM chips would not be able to match the current potential.
Now, in a new article published on his blog, the executive went back on his previous statements. The main reason for the turnaround was the Ampere Computing, maker of ARM chips that compete with Xeon processors used on servers and the new Mac Pro. Gasse wrote the following:
Ampere's top-of-the-line chips consume less power, about 210W, than equivalent processors in the Xeon line, which require about 400W for the same computing power. This explains investor interest in a device that could progressively supplant Intel products on millions of servers around the world. Ampere shows us that ARM architecture can generate the type of chip that a Mac Pro would need. And the chips happen to be manufactured by TSMC, the same company that makes Apple's series A processors.
Gasse notes that, at first, the transition from Mac Pro to an ARM chip could be economically disadvantageous because the superpowered computer from Apple does not have a large volume of sales, and spending efforts to design a processor from scratch for the machine would be counterproductive.
The executive notes, however, that this would be less in view of the advantages of such an undertaking: eventually, the ARM chips would also reach the other lines of Macs, such as the iMac and Mac mini, incidentally, taking the opposite path than most of us would expect, but producing an even smoother transition for users.
Makes sense, doesn't it?
via 9to5Mac