Really?<p>Moving away from the X86 instruction set 5 years after the move PowerPC is NOT going to happen, period. ARM is fine for the iPad, but for high performance work it doesn't cut it.<p>ARM tech & Intel have proven that they can scale, but only Intel has the performance advantage for years to come.<p>And come on! Fragment the Mac market in laptops with ARM and workstations with Intel chips is a really bad move. The only laptop that would have an ARM chip would be an iPad with a keyboard.
Apple has significant motivation to ditch x86 now that Intel has an effective monopoly in high end x86 chips. Intel's fab process is 2+ years ahead of the fabs used AMD and ARM competitors though, so Apple switching architectures will only make sense in the long run.<p>ARM competes because of a more power efficient architecture; however, this difference is less of an issue if Intel's fab process can get farther ahead of the competition.<p>In short term(next 4 years) Intel's lead fab lead will likely continue to grow, because Intel switched to Tri-Gate(FinFET) at the 22nm node while TSMC and others will not adopt similar technologies until 16nm node(2014 or later).
Well, that's fine if it's true. If it makes my next Mac even lighter, or have a longer battery life, that's a good reason to do it. Honestly, I don't care what ISA is used, and most people probably won't. Everything on the Mac app store will port over pretty easily, so doing this will be even easier than it was in 2005. All of the software I write nowadays is portable, so I don't care even from that perspective (Python, Ruby and Javascript, etc. run on anything). For me, this is about as much of a non-event as a switch to a different GPU or RAM supplier.