Apple ready to bring ARM processors on its computers already by the end of 2020. What are ARM processors and what changes
It seems that the long-awaited moment is about to arrive: Apple would be about to introduce the first MacBook computers equipped with ARM architecture processors and no longer Intel CPUs. The ARM processors in question would be chips designed in house, evolution of the architecture already used on the iPhone.
MacBooks with ARM processors have been talked about for a long time, but now the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (until now almost always reliable) speaks clearly of 2020 as the launch date of these new laptops. According to Ming-Chi Kuo, moreover, it will not only be Apple's laptops that will gain the new processors, but also desktops. This move would prove to be a very bad blow for Intel, which has already been suffering from AMD's comeback in the last two years, but also for Apple it would not be a painless move. But, at the end of the day, it would be justified for several reasons.
Arm Processors: what they are
The acronym ARM stands for "Advanced RISC Machine" and indicates a RISC-type processor, i.e. "Reduced instruction set computer". Intel and AMD processors, on the other hand, use a CISC architecture, which stands for "Complex instruction set computer". A RISC processor, to make a long story short, is simpler as an architecture and, if well exploited by software, faster than a CISC, but programs require a lot of memory. The CISC architecture, on the other hand, has the advantage of being easier to program and programs require less memory. RISC processors, at the moment, it seems that they can continue to be developed according to the rhythms of the famous Moore's law while CISCs would be almost at the limit.
ArmacBooks: what they will look like
Apple already uses ARM RISC architecture in its A13 Bionic chips and has used it also in previous generations of smartphone processors: the first iPhone already featured a processor with this architecture. In the mobile world, in fact, ARM has always been the preferred architecture. The jump to the computer world, however, is not as immediate as it might seem: all applications, in fact, would have to be reprogrammed or run in emulation (or other stratagems). For most of the software would not be a problem, but for the many professional apps that have made the history of the Apple brand (just think of those for graphics and video editing) the change of architecture could create huge problems.