Morning rumors: Apple to acquire ARM
I do not believe it, until I see it.
This would be way too strange to become real. I mean what would they gain? Not much actually, they can produce their own, optimized, ARM flavor already. The only benefit would be to take ARM away from competing companies. And in that case they would end up with a huge, unprofitable subsidy – unless they lay off most of the ARM staff.
However, if Apple really would cease ARM supplies to competitors it would certainly hurt the whole embedded industry – given that nearly any crapgadget, from your mobile phone, router, access-point to the NAS near you is powered by an ARM cpu.
Well, then, if that really turns out to be true, and Apple would indeed stop licensing ARM to others, there still are MIPS, SuperH, AVR32, heck, even PowerPC. Well, even x86 gets more energy efficient, (think post Atom silicon) … So the other companies still have options to continue their business.
So instead they could also directly burn their money. But still, I get to think that is an good Aprils fool – just 21 days off, …
PS: From my own experience AVR32 is pretty competitive on the performance per watt scale, if they just would scale their core IP to the GHz range (up from the current 140-200 MHz), …
