Macintel: The End Is Nigh ⇥ mondaynote.com

Interesting speculative “Monday note” from Jean-Louis Gassée:

Furthermore, it looks like I misspoke when I said an An chip couldn’t power a high-end Mac. True, the A7 is optimized for mobile devices: Battery-optimization, small memory footprint, smaller screen graphics than an iMac or a MacBook Pro with a Retina display. But having shown its muscle in designing a processor for the tight constraints of mobile devices, why would we think that the team that created the most advanced smartphone/tablet processor couldn’t now design a 3GHz A10 machine optimized for “desktop-class” (a term used by Apple’s Phil Schiller when introducing the A7) applications?

Today’s ARM chips are decidedly optimized for mobile usage because — spoiler alert — that’s where they’re used. But, while the architecture of the chip was decidedly built in favour of mobile and low-power usage in the beginning, today’s ARM chips are a completely different species. Imagine what kind of power an A-series chip could turn out if it were not encumbered by the power constraints of a smartphone (or a tablet, at the highest end of the available mobile power envelope).