Former Apple Mac chief of development Jean-Louis Gassée has said that Apple’s decision to switch to ARM processors for Mac will make it inevitable that high-end Windows PCs will have to do the same.
In turn, this will force Intel to start manufacturing its own ARM CPUs for use on Windows machines, it argues …
Gassée left Apple in 1990, but played an extremely influential role in Mac’s future as the man who shelved the company’s plans to license macOS to other manufacturers. He presents his case in a blog post.
First, he says, there are many reasons to believe Apple’s claims that ARM processors will offer more power and longer battery life.
According to Geekbench tests, the performance of A12Z matches or exceeds my MacBook Pro. Apple does not disclose the TDP for the A12Z processor, but we can rely on an indirect number, the output of the iPad Pro’s 18W power adapter. This gives us an idea of what to expect from Apple Silicon on future Macs: Significantly lower TDP without losing processing power.
Then performance. Given what we see with the A12Z of today, one cannot imagine that the Apple Silicon Macs of tomorrow offer a performance advantage of less than 25% compared to the corresponding x86 PCs. Admittedly, these are broad-based speculative assumptions for Apple Silicon Macs: Think faster, slimmer laptops really last 10 hours on a battery charge. If not, once again, why bother burning the billions?
Microsoft won’t be able to sit back and watch Apple take the lead with the most powerful PCs on the market, and neither will third-party brands that make Windows machines.
This leaves Microsoft an option: either forget Windows on ARM and cede modern PCs to Apple, or go ahead, troubleshoot application compatibility issues, and offer an ARM-based alternative to new Apple Macs. It is a false dilemma, of course. Microsoft will move on … with repercussions for the rest of the Windows PC industry.
Specifically, what are Dell, HP, Asus, and others going to do if Apple offers much better laptops and desktops and Microsoft continues to improve Windows on ARM Surface devices? To compete, PC makers will have to do the same, “go ARM” because, aside from all defensive rhetoric, Apple and Microsoft will have made the x86 architecture feel like it really is: old.
The company made a half-hearted attempt to make Surface machines with ARM processors, but they did not run many applications and they were not a success.
Since everyone will want ARM processors to run Windows, Intel won’t have a choice either.
This leaves Intel with a path: if you can’t beat them, join them. Intel will retake an ARM license (it sold its ARM-based XScale business to Marvell in 2006) and present a competitive offering of ARM SoC for PC OEMs.
Gassée had not initially thought that Apple could change all its machines to ARM, but in March it said TSMC had proven it wrong.
Ampere designs and sells high-powered ARM chips that compete with Xeon processors used in cloud servers […] Ampere shows us that the ARM architecture can produce the kind of chips that a Mac Pro would need. And in fact, the chips are made by TSMC, the same company that makes Apple’s Axx processors.
What is your sight? Do you think he is right that Windows machines will switch to ARM? Or will Microsoft lose the highest performance PC jackpot as it did on mobile? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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