iPhone moving from ARM to x86? UMPC OEMs take note
Ironically, in our last podcast we touched upon the topic of Apple’s current handheld platform morphing into a UMPC or MID. We even made some predictions and one of those is now the latest buzz in the tech world: Apple may move the iPhone to an Intel x86 architecture.
DigiTimes suggests that Apple is considering such a move, one that would take the current ARM architecture and replace it with Intel’s CPU offerings for UMPCs and MIDs. It’s one that makes sense to us (or we would have suggested it in the podcast) and might also partially explain why Apple hasn’t offered an SDK for iPhone development. If they did that and later made an architecture change, they’d have to deal with application compatibility just as they did when moving their Mac line from PowerPC to Intel. Bear in mind that Intel is planning to embed WiMAX capabilities in their future chip lines that will fall back to WiFi; the iPhone as we know it today could morph into a cellular-free but always connected powerful portable.
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Should be a no brainer there. OSX runs x86. Moorestown will run 50% less power than Menlow which is already around 0.5W. That’s getting close to ARM processors and it should at least run as fast as today’s Celerons.
Will have to wait a bit for that to come out.
Linux devs better work hard on MID’s.
Why does application compatability matter on the iPhone when its not officially supported to download any apps to the iPhone? Since anything that is approved is a browser app, that needs nothing at all from the side of the end-user.
If you will, this transistion will not effect any users using their devices in an approved manner, only those with extensions that hack various aspects of the system.
What Intel chips are currently powering cellphones? I don’t know of any. Are there any?!
Antoine, the current Apple policy is no 3rd party apps, but that has no bearing on the future policy. My point was that this may be one of the several reasons for no apps yet; Apple can’t easily offer the mechanism for 3rd party apps if their strategy is to change chip architecture.
Mike, many Windows Mobile phone devices up to a year or so ago were powered by Intel mobile handset chips; they sold that business off to Marvell. Now there are other players: TI, Samsung, etc…