Apple Dumping Intel For ARM?

One of the latest rumors circling the web is that Apple is dumping Intel and its x86 architecture for ARM—at least on laptops.

The short story is that Apple is moving the laptop line to ARM based chips as soon as possible. With A15/Eagle allowing more than 32-bit memory access, things look up, but it seems silly to do so before the full 64 bit cores come in the following generation. Nvidia is directly telling certain favored analysts that they will have Denver out in Q4 of 2012, maybe Q1/2013, and that uses the full on 64-bit ARM instruction set.

At that point, Apple can move to ARM without worrying about obsoleting code with an Industry Standard Architecture that is on the verge of changing, and no memory overhead worries either.

Now you realize why Apple is desperately searching for fab capacity from Samsung, Global Foundries, and TSMC. Intel doesn’t know about this particular change of heart yet, which is why they are dropping all the hints about wanting Apple as a foundry customer. Once they realize that Apple will be fabricating ARM chips at the expense of x86 parts, they may not be so eager to provide them wafers on advanced processes.