ARM-based Macs seen as 'inevitable,' but Apple unlikely to switch anytime soon: "Shaw Wu with Sterne Agee said in a note to investors on Tuesday that he believes it will take Apple some time to optimize its Mac OS X operating system for the ARM processors currently found in the iPad and iPhone."

Another view of the subject matter.

Labels: arm, intel

Will Apple Switch the Mac to ARM? Why Rumors Do, and Don't, Ring True. - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD: "Apple’s last shift in chip technology happened during 2005 and 2006, when it pivoted away from the old IBM-made PowerPC architecture and instead embraced Intel’s processors, which already run inside most of the world’s personal computers."

I think this would be a relatively easy transition except for the emulation layer.

Labels: arm, intel

Apple's new A6 iPhone 5 appears to be first ARM Cortex A15 phone: "According to a report by Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech, the performance gains Apple reported for the new A6 chip and other factors means that 'it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 cores on Samsung's 32nm LP HK+MG process.'

The site added, 'This is a huge deal because it means Apple beat both TI and Samsung on bringing A15s to market.'"

Hard to see an Intel in Apple's longterm future.

Labels: apple, arm, intel

AMD is working with Intel, Nvidia and others on OpenCL, a standard for parallel C programming on x86 and graphics chips based on work from Apple Inc. OpenCL could be ratified by Khronos, a graphics industry standards group, as early as December and be supported in software products early next year.

Labels: gpgpu, intel, opengl

Intel Macs Plagued by Freezing

A growing number of users have reported that Apple's aluminum all-in-one computers suffer from a flaw that locks up the interface, rendering the system all but inert until a reboot.

Customers participating in Apple's official support discussions (one, two) have reported that the new iMac will technically continue to run when the freeze occurs, but that it becomes impossible to control or switch to programs without a hard reset.

"Whatever was going on at the time continues, so if you were listening to music it continues to play," one user wrote. "The mouse pointer moves but you cannot select anything. Tabbing through apps doesn't work."

Labels: intel, mac

Apple MacBook owners organizing class action lawsuit

Owners of Apple Computer's new 13-inch MacBook notebooks, whose systems are plagued by intermittent shutdown issues, have become fed up with extended repair times and inadequate resolutions to the problem, and are now organizing a class action lawsuit against the Mac maker.

The issue, which users have dubbed "RSS," or Random Shutdown Syndrome, has been well documented on Apple's discussion boards and other forums around the web. During ordinary use, affected MacBooks will randomly shut down, effectively rendering the systems unreliable.

Users have reported shutdown intervals anywhere from once a week to several times a day. Sometimes, one random shutdown will occur within minutes of the previous one, making the notebooks completely unusable.

Compounding frustrations is Apple's inability so far to completely remedy the issue for most users after holding their faulty systems at repair depots for lengthy periods of time.

This is what Apple gets for using Intel motherboards and integrated graphics chipset.

This isn't the portable pad I'm using, but I will say, the hardware glitches I've seen got a lot worse under 10.4.8.

Labels: intel, mac

Transmeta seeks Core 2 Duo injunction against Intel

A new lawsuit filed against Intel Corp. on behalf of Transmeta threatens to prevent the chipmaker from shipping microprocessors to PC manufacturers such as Apple Computer.

According to InfoWorld, Transmeta is charging Intel with violating 10 of its patents covering processor design and power efficiency techniques.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, seeks damages, royalty payments, and an injunction barring Intel from selling infringing products such as the Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core and Core 2 processors.

The lawsuit comes after the two companies failed to agree to licensing terms, said Transmeta's President and Chief Executive Officer Arthur Swift. "Friendly win-win discussions between the two parties had broken down and we thought is was appropriate now to turn to the courts."

I'm sure this is true. Most of the big semiconductor manufacturers have wide cross-licensing of patents. Without these power-reducing technologies referred to in this article, Intel would not be currently supplying CPUs for Mac portables. You can bet that much.

Labels: intel, mac

Intel to preview quad-core Xeon MP

Intel to preview quad-core Xeon MP
Intel is planning to preview on Friday its ultra-high-end, quad-core Xeon MP processor. The chip, code-named Tigerton, is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2007, an Intel spokesman confirmed.
Intel will show off the processor at a media briefing to be held in San Francisco. The Tigerton device will officially ship under the Xeon MP 7000 Series moniker. The MP designation stands for multiprocessor. This means that the 7000-Series parts are intended for use in servers with multiple sockets; thus, a two-socket system with dual Series-7000 MP chips would in fact have eight physical CPU cores.

Labels: intel, mac

Microsoft delays Mac Office 2007 release

Microsoft doesn't expect to ship the next version of its flagship suite Office for the Mac until the second of half of 2007, confirming a report from last month. The next version of its flagship office suite will bring an enhanced look and feel to match Mac OS X's interface evolution, and enhanced features as well as Universal Binary support for native performance on Intel-based Macs; however, Reuters reports that the company does not expect to ship the much-anticipated Universal update until eight months after the release of its Windows counterpart.

Labels: intel, mac

Apple Engineer under double NDA leaked MacIntel on Public List

One time on an Apple mailing list for a java developer preview (aka pre-release) I let the Intel build leak in a minor and non-obvious way. There unfortunately aren't archives of this list kept by Apple, and I no longer have my copy of the message. I believe I wa explaining how to determine what libraries your library needed, or perhaps to determine if your JNI library was pre-bound. This is done with 'otool'. I usually provide options to have 'otool' give lots of data about the library being inspected. This includes its FAT header information. I provided an example in my email, and I was working on my Mac OS X Intel build machine. I copy and pasted the information into my email, and I snipped all of the Intel information. However (and memory escapes me) I had somehow left something funky in there. I believe it may be the dependent libraries are listed twice, once for each architecture

Labels: intel, mac

IBM's Power6 gets help with math, multimedia

SAN JOSE, Calif.--IBM's forthcoming Power6 processor can count to 10.
That may not sound like anything special for a processor whose clock ticks at a rate approaching 5 billion times each second. But Power6 can count to 10--and perform numerous other mathematical operations--with the decimal digits 0 through 9 rather than the binary digits of 0 and 1 used by conventional computers.

I'm for it. Each year, Apple chooses the best CPU available and builds the most amazing machines possible.

Labels: intel, mac, powerpc