ARMED AND READY

Could a major change be coming to the insides of our PCs?

- Ian Evenden

You may have missed it, but for the third time in its existence phone company Apple is moving its desktop computers to a new CPU architecture. This time, from the Intel X86-64 chips it moved to in 2006/7 and with which we’re familiar with from our PCs, to its own designs based on the ARM chips we’re familiar with from our smartphones and tablets.

The move has been mooted for a while, dating back to 2009 when Apple bought processor company PA Semi to develop chips for its iPods and iPhones, starting with the 800MHz, single-core, A4 chip in the 2010 iPhone 4 and first-generation iPad. Since then, the power of the chips has grown hugely, with the 2011 iPhone 4S (Apple A5, dual-core, 1GHz) showing a 68 percent gain in speed, and the A12X Bionic chip in the iPad Pro (2018, eight cores, 2.49GHz, seven GPU cores) showing benchmark results on a par with a Core i7, and AMD’s Durango 2 graphics chip for the Xbox One S.

Leaked benchmarks from developer preview Mac minis equipped with the A12Z chip from the 2020 iPad Pro (usually eight cores, 2.49GHz, eight-core GPU), posted in flagrant disregard of Apple’s T&Cs, show a 30 percent drop in performance when compared to a MacBook Air with a Core i3. That’s nothing short of phenomenal, considering that the chip is not one intended to go into Macs, as it was downclocked and not operating on all cores in the mini, and the benchmark software was using the Rosetta 2 software translation layer to run. Apple has given a two-year timetable to move to Apple Silicon, by which time the glitches will be worked out, Rosetta 2 will be gone, and desktop-class Apple Silicon with who knows how many cores will be available.