Back at the end of June 2020 Apple made the not entirely unexpected announcement that it’ll eventually be ditching all Intel processors for a CPU architecture of its own design. As you may know, since 2010 Apple has been using its own in-house designed Arm-based mobile processors to power its iPhone and iPad devices.
The evolution of these processors has delivered substantial speed increases generation over generation to the point that they could challenge low-end Intel desktop processors a number of years ago, while the latest designs were as fast in single-core results as high-end Intel cores. So it’s no surprise Apple would move to create its own desktop processors.
While initial reports seemed to indicate Apple Arm devices would be entirely locked down, our own Jon Masters reported that this may in fact not be the case, which is good as the Linux and FOSS world has been running Arm-compiled software for years. So will the 2020s see a move to mainstream RISC desktops?