Apple Hires Key Chip Designer From ARM As Own Efforts Ramp Up (bloomberg.com) 38
Apple has hired one of ARM's top chip engineers as the iPhone maker looks to expand its own chip development to more powerful devices, including the Mac, and new categories like a headset. Bloomberg reports: The company hired Mike Filippo in May for a chip architect position, according to his LinkedIn profile. At ARM, Filippo was a lead engineer behind chip designs that power the vast majority of the world's smartphones and tablets and was leading a new push into parts for computers. ARM, owned by SoftBank, designs microprocessors and licenses technology that is fundamental to the chip development efforts of Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Huawei.
Prior to his work at ARM, Filippo was also a key designer at chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. For Apple, the hire could help fill the void left by the departure of Gerard Williams III earlier this year. Williams was Apple's head architect of chips used in the iPhone and iPad. Apple's A series chips power its mobile devices using ARM technology. Its Mac computers have used processors from Intel for nearly two decades.
Prior to his work at ARM, Filippo was also a key designer at chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. For Apple, the hire could help fill the void left by the departure of Gerard Williams III earlier this year. Williams was Apple's head architect of chips used in the iPhone and iPad. Apple's A series chips power its mobile devices using ARM technology. Its Mac computers have used processors from Intel for nearly two decades.
Re: Apple, baby (Score:1)
They had "OSX" running on x86 before NeXT acquired Apple.
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Surely you mean "Apple acquired NeXT [wikipedia.org]".
Interesting (Score:1)
Thanks for the post
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iPadOS-Pro on iPadPro (Score:2)
There are two ways Apple can bring ARM on "Mac". One is to replace Intel chip and put ARM chip like Microsoft did on Surface and failed miserably. I doubt Apple will go via this path and risk their current Mac line. Another is to make a version of iPadOS-Pro to run on iPadPro and bring it at par with Mac in functionality. At that point, people can choose Mac or iPadPro running iPadOS-Pro. They will bring all their software to iPadOS-Pro and provide a quick switch to target exising Mac code to iPadOS. My fee
Re:iPadOS-Pro on iPadPro (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like when Apple dumped the 68K line of processors
You mean like when Apple dumped the PPC line of processors
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In both cases they upgraded to higher performance processors. Switching to ARM would be a downgrade.
If they do it they will probably look to make up the performance gap by having more applications use GPU acceleration.
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You mean like when Apple dumped the 68K line of processors You mean like when Apple dumped the PPC line of processors
Yeah, like that. Would give their CPUs greater volume and more margin, putting less pressure on them to try to push iPads. It also helps Apple have a uniform architecture for both Macs and iPhones.
Re: iPadOS-Pro on iPadPro (Score:2)
Re: Poaching again apple. (Score:1)
It's a fine pedagogical language. I took a class in it at college in the early 80s. For a time I ran a BBS coded in Turbo Pascal.
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As far as Pascal dialects go, Apple had a good UCSD variant, and it did Object Pascal much better than the abortion that came out of Borland, thanks to the Macintosh Memory Manager and linear addressing. That was back when TP compiled to real-mode DOS, with the 640K RAM limitation and segmented addressing, and their horrible heap management. I got the impression that Borland hired some college kid who only knew C++ to come up with their dialect of Object Pascal over the summer break. It still needed changes
14 years != "nearly two decades" (Score:5, Informative)
Apple announced the switch to Intel processors in 2005 [wikipedia.org], and the first Intel macs went on sale in early 2006.
That's "nearly a decade and a half" not "nearly two decades."
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And prior to the announcement, Apple had already been running OSX on Intel processors for five years [youtu.be].
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So that's 14 years + 5 years = nearly two decades.
Virtual +1 Informative to you, necro81.
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And as an added bonus, nobody would be able to make 1:1 direct comparisons with Intel or AMD CPUs anymore, thus making PC vs Mac benchmarks even more murky.