Apple Netbook/Tablet to come with ARM, not Intel chip?

Seth Weintraub
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December 08, 2008
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I had a long talk with Bob Morris, director of platform enablement for ARM's mobile processor group.  While he wasn't able to mention Apple specifically, he did go into many reasons why a company like Apple would choose the ARM architecture over Intel (performance/Watt - sound familiar?).

He also left me with some internal Powerpoint slides which seemed to tell more of the story.

Read the Computerworld article

 

Comments (7)

Martin (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 12:01am

I hope this is true, I have ARM shares. They need a lift.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 3:10am

Salesman for ARM says that ARM is the best platform for apple to use, news at 11.

admin | December 08, 2008 - 3:47am

He's not a salesman but I get your point.  Just have a look at the video.  Or the benchmarks.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 8:15am

Well... the video is really lame. Any basic EE or CE student knows you can't extrapolate numbers like that. I would ask the question why the ARM unit they tested wasn't running at the same MHz as the Atom chip. Honestly. If you want to make that comparison then make that comparison.

Perhaps the ARM chip can't handle those frequencies without melting or failing? I'm sure it can, but it's kinda lame to try and make that comparison.

And to top it off... just because they put a MBA pic on the slide doesn't mean jack.

I'm sure everyone who wants to talk about "netbooks" uses MBA pics because the MBA looks so much better than everything else.

Oh... and he got some free press by the Apple fanclub because he put that image on there. I'm sure it wasn't a mistake.

Not A Scoop

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 5:16am

I dunno... Remember this guy's an ARM exec. He's likely to be biased.

ChrisM (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 6:41am

I think it makes alot of sense for the new Rev 3 iPhone to jump to the Cortex-8. I think the selling points are going to be:

4x the performance
Better battery life
iChat Video (front facing camera)
Video recording with direct uploads to youtube (bumped camera specs with 30fps video)
32GB version, 64GB?
Faster 3G supported? ATT did say they had plans for 7mbps in '09+

I just wonder if they will keep the update schedule in June/July, of push it out to the fall this year.

rick (not verified) | December 08, 2008 - 1:36pm

It is amazing how many devices have ARM processors: GBA, Gameboy DS, Anything Win Mobile (xscale), iphones, newtons, palm pilots, GP2X and many more devices.

I'm sure there will be more consumer market penetration once these pda phones are standardized onto a few OSes (cocoa touch, android, QT (Symbian).