But having shown its muscle in designing a processor for the tight constraints of mobile devices, why would we think that the team that created the most advanced smartphone/tablet processor couldn’t now design a 3GHz A10 machine optimized for “ desktop-class” (a term used by Apple’s Phil Schiller when introducing the A7) applications? True, the A7 is optimized for mobile devices: Battery-optimization, small memory footprint, smaller screen graphics than an iMac or a MacBook Pro with a Retina display. (The delay stems from an ambitious move to a bleeding edge fabrication technology that shrinks the basic building block of a chip to 14 nanometers, down from 22 nanometers in today’s Haswell chips.) Of course, Apple and its A n semiconductor vendor could encounter similar problems-but the company would have more visibility, more control of its own destiny.įurthermore, it looks like I misspoke when I said an A n chip couldn’t power a high-end Mac. Imagine what would happen if there was an App Store blog…But I digress.) Secondly, the Mac line is suspended, literally, by the late delivery of Intel’s Broadwell x86 processors (For kremlinology’s sake I’ll point out that there is an official Apple Swift blog, a first in Apple 2.0 history if you exclude the Hot News section of the of site. As a recent example, Apple created its own Swift programming language that complements its Xcode IDE and Clang/LLVM compiler infrastructure. In the first place, Apple’s drive to own “all layers of the stack” continues unabated years after Steve’s passing. I cited iMacs and Mac Pros-the high end of the product line-as examples of what descendants of the A7 couldn’t power. Towards the end of the article, unfortunately, I dismissed the speculation that Apple A n processors would someday power the Mac. The usual suspects pooh-poohed Apple’s new homegrown CPU, and I indulged in a little fun skewering the microprocessor truthers: 64 bits. In September 2013, almost a year ago already, Apple introduced the 64-bit A7 processor that powers new iPhones and iPads.
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