Apple to reveal own processor plans at WWDC

Bloomberg is saying that Apple will is set to announced its transition away from Intel to its own ARM chips at WWDC on 22 June.

There have been plenty of rumours that the company would be making a move like this, but there was a lot of uncertainly about whether it would announce its plans as soon as this month.

Bloomberg indicates that Apple will reveal its plans for the transition at WWDC in order to give Mac developers time to get their apps ready for when the first Apple ARM-powered Macs ship.

There are bound to be parallels to when Apple announced the transition from PowerPC to Intel chips at WWDC 2005. That transition was complete by the end of 2006, but back then third-party apps that weren’t ready for Intel were able to take advantage of Rosetta (Apple’s solution for translating the code so that all apps could run on the new processors).

This transition is known internally as Kalamata.

As for making its own processors, Apple already makes its own processors for iPhones and iPad so it does have form. However, as we explained in this article Why Apple Needs To Ditch Intel, we expect that initially these processors will be destined for consumer Macs. We assume it will be a long time before these ARM processors can provide the necessary processing power for more professional Macs.

However, we may be wrong: Bloomberg has previously claimed that Apple is working on a 12-core ARM chip that uses the 5 namometer fabrication process.

Bloomberg says Apple’s already seen marked gains in GPU and artificial intelligence computational performance.

We’ve previously speculated about whether the MacBook could return in the guise of the first ARM-powered Mac. You can read about that here: ARM-powered MacBook.