Apple is gearing up to announce a major transition from Intel to its own custom Arm-based chips for its newest Macs, Bloomberg reports.
The announcement is expected at Apple’s annual WWDC event, to start June 22. It would put Apple among the growing number of major technology providers looking to put their own silicon in flagship products.
That’s a trend both in the west, where companies are keen to diversify their offerings and shift away from reliance on the long-dominant Intel, as well as in the east, where China is scrambling to bolster its indigenous processor capabilities in the face of ever-stricter US export restrictions.
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Apple already designs Arm-based chips for its iPhones and iPads, that are made for it by Taiwanese semiconductor maker TSMC.
UK-based Arm is owned by Japan’s Softbank.
It recently unveiled a host of new chip designs including for its popular Mali GPU — which has been beefed up to offer 24 cores — and a new Cortex A-78 CPU which Arm claims offers a 50 percent energy saving over 2019 devices at the same performance as its predecessor, the Cortex-A77
Bloomberg has also previously reported that Apple is preparing a new Arm-based 5nm CPU design that outperform its existing Intel lineup of MacBook Airs. (In a further move towards silicon independence, Apple bought out Intel’s 5G chip business in July 2019 for $1 billion.)
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Apple posted quarterly revenues of $58.3 billion on March 28, on the back of record services and wearables revenues.
Intel, meanwhile, reported revenues of $19.8 billion for the past quarter. The company rattled OEM partners with persistent CPU supply constraints across the PC segment during 2019. It now also faces increasingly fierce competition from a resurgent rival, AMD.
Read this: Apple Spends $1 Billion on Intel’s 5G Chip Business – Gets 17,000 Patents, 2,200 Staff
