A couple of speculative reports have come out about what plans Apple might have for its ARM-based processors in the coming year. Apple is rumored to be a major architectual licensee for ARM. This would offer Apple an added level of control and ownership over its processors. Apple presently uses the ARM processor in the iPhone and iPod Touch. Additional evidence has pointed to the fact that Apple acquired P.A. Semi specifically for their expertise in low-power processor development.
Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub recently spoke with Bob Morris, director of platform enablement for ARM's mobile processor group, and believes that Apple will incorporate ARM processors in future netbooks and/or tablets. The newest ARM processors are said to have equal performance to Intel's Atom processors but dramatically lower power consumption:
We are talking Apples and Oranges here. Not double, but an order of magnitude better for ARM. Some ARM chips routinely use 10-20 times less power than Intel for similar operations. Battery usage with ARM chips in prospective netbooks could be measured in days, not hours much like smartphones.
Meanwhile, Global Equities Research analyst takes it a step further by claiming that Apple will launch "a completely new device category" in the second half of 2009 based on chips produced by P.A. Semiconductor. Unfortunately, the credibility of the report is somewhat marred by the seemingly nonsensical statement that the new processors "will have the Objective-C instruction set built into the chip".
Regardless, Apple seems to have made some major moves in terms of custom processor development in 2008. While it's been assumed that these investments have been directed at the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's conceivable the technology will trickle to future devices.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
