Performance By Design

In late June, Apple announced plans to transition its next generation Mac computers from Intel-manufactured x64 processors to custom ARM chips, something which Apple has branded as “Apple Silicon,” highlighting the provenance of the new hardware. Later this year when the first Apple Silicon-based Macs begin to roll out, the company’s line of Mac portable and desktop computers will be using the same ARM processors that Apple is currently using in its iPhone and iPad  products. While there has been ample coverage of this news in the trade press, much of the commentary I have seen online from various technology pundits ( here is a representative sample analysis from one of these self-anointed experts) misses many key aspects of Apple’s recent decision. Apples’s move warrants a better and more complete analysis. In brief, moving off of Intel processors and on to ARM CPUs is not a huge deal, but it is a very smart move. What is fundamentally significant about the decision to switch ...

I cannot resist adding to some of the industry buzz about the recent HP Project Moonshot announcement and what this potentially means for folks that run Windows. As part of Project Moonshot, HP is planning to release something called the Redstone Server Development Platform in 1H12, an ARM-based, massively parallel supercomputer that uses 90% less energy than comparable Intel microprocessors. Coupled with the big.Little hardware announcement from the ARM Consortium about two weeks ago, I think this is big news that could shake up the foundations of Windows computing. ARM-based Windows Server machines could well be in all our futures. Let’s start with ARM and the big.Little architecture announcement, which is pretty interesting in itself. Details are from this white paper . big.Little is an explicit multi-core architecture where a simple, low power version of the processor is packaged together with a significantly more powerful (~ 2x) version of the processor that also uses about...