Apple to ARM its Laptops in 2013?

Former Inquirer writer Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate (via MacRumors) today posts that Apple’s laptop transition from Intel to ARM is a “Done deal”

The short story is that Apple is moving the laptop line, and presumably desktops too, to ARM based chips as soon as possible. With A15/Eagle allowing more than 32-bit memory access, things look up, but it seems silly to do so before the full 64 bit cores come in the following generation. Nvidia is directly telling certain favored analysts that they will have Denver out in Q4 of 2012, maybe Q1/2013, and that uses the full on 64-bit ARM instruction set. It won’t be out by then, but that gives you a good estimation of when that ISA will break cover from one vendor or other. Think mid-2013.

Scholars of recent history would point to Apple’s two earlier architecture transitions as examples of Apple’s hardware flexibility.  That being said, two-three years from now iOS might be more of a laptop-capable OS from which Apple could build some, if not all of its laptops on.

Interestingly, nowhere in the post is any mention of the words ‘Mac’ or ‘Macintosh’.

SemiAccurate was even more so on their previous assertion that Apple was heading away from NVIDIA as a GPU/chipset provider, though with NVIDIA’s “bumps” issue and growing competition with Apple and its Tegra line, it wasn’t a hard assertion to make.

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