Apple and Microsoft move to ARM chips

It seems that both Apple and Microsoft think that the future of microprocessors may lie with ARM rather than Intel products. Both companies are working on getting future versions of their operating systems running on ARM chips.

With Apple, of course, there are only rumours and speculation, but there have been plenty of them in the last week or two. Here is a Cnet report: Apple to ditch Intel for ARM in MacBooks in which is is said that Apple is to drop Intel in favour  of ARM and that it is a done deal. Here is another, Analysts' take: Apple going to ARM on MacBooks. One more example, Rumour: Apple plans to move laptops from Intel to ARM processors.


Only Apple knows what its plans are and it isn't telling anyone else. Microsoft though, is very open about its future development plans and it has publicly announced that the next version of Windows will run on ARM processors.You can read the press release at the Microsoft website.

Given Microsoft's announcement it is quite likely that there is some truth in the Apple rumour. It is interesting that these two companies are investing a lot of money and resources in getting their OS running on ARM. They obviously see a future in which ARM devices are running Windows and OS X instead of, or perhaps as well as, traditional Intel ones.

If you look at the hardware development of mobile phones and tablets, they are becoming increasingly powerful and now we have 1GHz dual core ARM chips powering them with up to 64Gb of RAM, fast graphics chips and so on. Just think what we'll have in a couple of years - 2GHz quad core ARM CPUs? maybe, and with this amount of processing power you could run a full operating system and not just a cut down mobile version.

Microsoft has tried putting Windows on tablet PCs and it didn't work, but perhaps it was just an idea that was ahead of its time. Next year or the year after we may have hardware that is powerful enough to run a full OS and still give 10 hours battery life in a device that is light enough to hold in your hand.

It will soon be possible to create a tablet or smartphone that has the full Windows or OS X operating system on it. All it needs is two user interfaces. When you are carrying it around in your hand it would have a mobile touch-screen interface like today's tablets and smartphones. When you get home or to the office you plug the device into a cradle or docking station and it becomes a desktop computer running the full OS. You seamlessly carry on working on your documents whether in mobile or desktop mode and only the interface changes. That's an interesting prospect.