Surprise surprise, there's talk on Bloomberg that Apple's looking to jump ship away from Intel and in fact, x86 all-together.
The fruity firm has a track record for such moves, previously basing its hardware on Motorola 68000 series chips and IBM's PowerPC architecture. Apple appears to have no affinity to any one architecture, though we wonder just how welcome another move would be so close to the jump away from PowerPC to x86, which began in 2006, running through to 2009.
A move this time would see Apple adopt ARM architecture and, progress with this IP can been seen in the company's latest iPad A6X processor, which features custom cores built around ARM tech, chugging-out impressive performance figures. Without the power-profile constraints of an ultra-portable, Apple could easily look to increase core count and implement multi-processor systems at comparative costs to Intel processors.
It's believed that such changes are still in the 'mulling' phase and that any move wouldn't take place until 2017 at the earliest, though no doubt Apple techies will be hard at work, working towards a high-power, high-performance goal from now onward.
Honestly, we would be quite interested to see ARM intellectual property pushed into direct competition with x86, we only hope that Apple doesn't cause a dividing line between the two architectures with its typically brash approach.
