2011 May

How Apple can make use of ARM (and Intel) in its laptop line

There’s been some speculation about Apple moving to ARM in some of its MacBook products. This has been largely dismissed as pure rumour by a number of folks: the costs to developers of adding another platform to the universal binary format (“universal trinaries”) would be prohibitive. On top of that, the difficultly of emulating x86 or x64-compiled code on a purely ARM platform with reasonable performance would be a very challenging task.

That’s not to say that it’s totally impossible for Apple to take advantage of the potential power savings of making an ARM switch.