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Apple's got a brand new processor?
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Ramp up your speculation engines, ladies and gentlemen, this looks like the most interesting news to hit since Apple said they were switching from PowerPC to Intel.
If you've been following the behind-the-scenes stuff going on at Apple, they've been hiring some unique individuals.
You might remember Mark Papermaster, formerly of IBM, who had some legal issues getting hired since he signed a non-competitive agreement with IBM. But now that all the litigation has ended, Papermaster has started his work as VP of Device Hardware Engineering. Papermaster's former job at IBM was VP of the blade server devision, which leaves open the speculation that Apple is working on sprucing up their XServe line.
Or is it something else?
Jumping into the Apple basket are two former AMD/ATI employees, Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri. Both of them were Chief Technology Officers for the GPU/CPU giant. Bob Drebin is now a Senior Director at Apple, but Koduri's place in the company is yet to be leaked. These guys are big names in their field and it raises some serious questions about what Apple is planning.
If you're thinking a new Apple CPU, you'd be thinking what I'm thinking. Apple recently acquired a CPU company, P.A. Semi. Their speciality is/was ARM chips, but more recently, low-power 64 bit processors. Apple is always going on about 64-bit stuff and they constantly boast about OS X's 64-bit capabilities. Since the iPhone OS is a branch of OS X, this could mean even cooler things coming to your hand, since low-level speculation insists that P.A. Semi's engineers would be working on a special CPU for the iPod touch / iPhone.
But all this chip-happy hiring nonsense makes me want to dream bigger than that.
If Apple gears itself up with the right people, it could produce its own perfectly custom tailored CPU. I know it sounds crazy, since I'm sure you'd be quick to point out the intimate relationship Apple holds with Intel right now, but it could end up to be incredibly cost effective.
And a lot more powerful.
Apple already synthesizes an incredibly close bond between OS X and their hardware, so you could only imagine if the brain of the computer came from the heart of Apple. I'm not a chip expert by any means, but if Apple figured out a way to create CPU's and GPU's custom tailored for OS X, it would mean a level of performance that was near unstoppable. Every line of code could be uniquely optimized, every facet of hardware specially tweaked for certain functionalities.
Admittedly, it seems unlikely in the very near future. The consequence of shifting the paradigm that far would be costly. If the chip didn't have an x86 architecture, it could alienate buyers who are coming to Apple for Boot Camp and Linux usage---not to mention the endless compiling of new code.
But it seems only fair to note that Apple plans ahead quite frequently. When Apple announced switching to Intel processors, Steve Jobs admitted at the WWDC in June of 2005 that every version of OS X had always been compiled to run on x86 along with PowerPC. That code, obviously, was kept under lock and key for some time.
Like a lot speculation, we'll have to wait and see (hopefully in June!) But the undeniable thing is that Apple is gearing up for some interesting and innovative technology in the future.
And I feel like that's the understatement of the year.
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