So Facebook will spend a billion to deliver what, exactly... a home internet speaker that will automatically post to Facebook pictures of my dinner, so I don't have to? Detect what TV shows I watch and give me automatic LIKEs for those? Listen to my phone calls and automatically "Friend" those people? Trick the Echo next to it into ordering random crap, so we get rid of it?

The 64-bit instruction set used in 64-bit x86 processors was originated by AMD. The ISA these days is a mix, since Intel designed most of the new instructions, SSE (AMD has a competing thing called 3D Now!), etc.

The machine architecture to run those instructions changes from processor family to processor family, and was certainly designed by Intel, when it's in an Intel chip. Both Intel and AMD use their own version of the technique first used in the NexGen's processors, the idea of converting x86 instructions on-the-fly into one or more RISC-like instructions. But just the idea (well, AMD bought NexGen and used some of their technology directly in the K6 series).

It's not really close to the same situation.

When Apple went PowerPC, they were going there for performance, to support the huge percentage of the media content creation market they had wound up with, back when PCs didn't support such things very well. Motorola wasn't competitive with Intel, in a big part because in 1996 Apple was the last standing 68K personal computer company and didn't have the market share to sustain that kind of development for Motorola/Freescale.

The idea with the AIM Alliance was to promote a standard PowerPC platform (PReP, I mean CHRP, no PPCP, ok, maybe CHRP... ) to rival the Intel/IBM Ad Hoc standard. That was not a bad idea.

The problem was that, immediately, other comapanies did this better than Apple. Power Computing won a big chunk of the market. My company at the time, PIOS AG, launched the first 300MHz Mac Clone available. And then when SJ came back, it was curtains for the gherkins... he was the original closed, appliance computer, and it had to be "mine, mine, all mine". Of course, SJ neglected one of the main points of AIM -- enough volume to keep hardware competitive with Intel. So in 1997, it was absolutely obvious that Apple would eventually leave PowerPC. The PPC970 was nice... for about two weeks. Intel pretty much invented the way all successful modern chip comapnies work, with multiple tweaks of each technology and three independent teams always working on the Next Big Thing. So there's a new thing every six months. That's how nVidia won on GPUs... doing the Intel thing.

But these days, Apple's scared off their high end media content creation people by phoning it in on the Mac Pro. A new major upgrade every five years, whether you need it or not. They have built market share mostly from iOS coattail people... like my sister Kathy. Maybe this report is nothing, but it makes perfect sense for Apple to move macOS closer to iOS. It saves on development efforts. It lets them push out more advanced ARM tech before it's possible to make that low enough power. It will win more coattail customers. The average desktop PC user today doesn't need a faster CPU than a decent ten-year-old PC, and Apple's ARM cores are already faster than that.

Not my next computer, but then again, the last Macintosh I'd even have considered using was the one I was the CHRP machine I was developing back then Jobs put the kebash on the whole thing. Apple doesn't build serious computers today, anyway.

The real problem Adobe had wasn't Apple changing processors, it was Apple not selling enough computers. At one point Apple fell to about 1.5% of global PC shipments. Adobe did what every other successful company did -- it concentrated on supporting the platform with actual paying customers: Windows.

That prompted Apple to get more serious about their own in-house professional media content creation software. And that didn't help the rift between Apple and Adobe at all. Then there was Jobs, going in full attack mode about Adobe Flash... not that he was wrong about proprietary Flash vs. standard HTML5. And Adobe didn't fundamentally care, because Flash was just a means to the end of their selling Flash development tools. But a smack-down is a smack-down.

Today, the Mac is 10% of less of Apple's business. They don't want to kill it, but it's also a ton of work compared to iOS per unit sold. RIght now they have to have several different laptops at different performance levels, they have to have iMacs, they still have Mac Pros though they only seem to sell in the first year or two of their 5-year-or-so lifespan. As that market continues to shrink, Apple's going to contiune to lose interest unless it becomes, essentially, part of the iOS product lineup.

Most embedded application processors have at least one PCIe link... no idea about Apple's, specifically, but that's a standard everyday module on the Chinese Menu of ARM components. I don't know if Apple is using AMBA/AHB for high speed internals on today's SOCs, or something else, but it's available right now up to 1024-bits wide. I doubt they'd have a performance bottleneck for laptop/desktop things.

And they're not building a Xeon or i7, either... Apple's been slowly killing off their high-end users through years of high-end neglect. They could pick up more sales, and lower development costs, by pushing the Macintosh into more of a desktop/laptop iPad Pro kind of thing... still mouse & keyboard but more like what iOS users expect. Not that I'd buy one, but I'd never buy a Mac PC either.

There was never anything called "Acorn RISC Machines".

There was the Acorn RISC Machine -- the V1.0 ARM Architecture and all that began at Acorn Computers Ltd. When the CPU company was split off from the main body of Acorn, it was launched as Advanced RISC Machines, and it was a three-way partnership between Acorn, Apple, and chip maker VLSI Technology.

Right. Apple currently sells around 15-20 million macOS machines a year. And they're nearly all relatively low-to-midrange PCs; the Mac Pro is chronically out-of-date. That's compared to 200 million iOS machines.

The macOS market may be relatively stable, but it's not growing. Apple spends far more effort per model on macOS systems than they do iOS systems, particularly given the large number of macOS models versus the numbers selling. If they evolved the today's Macintosh into less of a PC and more of a desktop iPad, they'd perhaps lose some or many of the remaining higher-end Mac users, but they might stand to gain a whole mess of iOS people, looking to extend their iOS experience more directly onto a more powerful laptop.

They probably could match lower-end Intel performance on their ARM chips. Apple is delivering faster cores today than anyone else in mobile. None of the other mobile ARM vendors really see value is jacking up their CPUs as much, and of course, Apple depends more on single-tasking performance in iOS than does Android. So freed of tight power constraints, they might hand you an i5-ish performance laptop or with 20 hours of battery life, or a cooler running iMac.

And sure, it might be a negotiating tactic. But they're certainly paying much, much less for their CPUs than the would from Intel's. A 20 million unit production isn't necessarily enough to really keep costs down, but they're sharing that with their 200 million unit mobile business, since both lines of CPUs will share technology. Apple doesn't have to differentiate in expensive ways; a few different packages with the same CPU but different speeds/cores/cache and they're probably filling out most of their current Mac sales.

And Apple's probably not paying much in royalties. Sure, ARM orginally meant Acorn RISC Machine, but the company was spun out as Advanced RISC Machines in a joint partnership between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology. Not sure if Apple actually kept any ownership long-term, especially after the Softbank purchase. But that wouldn't have necessarily affected their long-ago negotiated Architecture License.

Naa...we're these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...... or will be in a few million or maybe billion years, when we're around in our advanced ships, messing with the minds of the younger races.

We would have been sittin' pretty with broadband wiring back when there was a government-regulated Telco, the old AT&T, had they gone ahead with the PicturePhone in the 1960s. But these days, there's no main telco, they're all private companies with only the minimal of must-wire controls. And they wouldn't necessarily solve the last mile problem in a way acceptable to any other wired carrier.

Wireless is a better possibility, but the big wireless companies, the ones with the existing infrastructure here, are used to absolutely raping their customers over data use. They apparently make far too much money there to consider at proper home broadband open a worthy goal. For one, they'd have to offer you 10-50x the monthly data cap at higher speeds for less money, or they'd be clobbered anytime a wired carrier entered the area. Concentrating on the advantage of mobile on less consumptive devices, they're maintaining those 40-50% profit margins.

Not so much. They'll race to your crowded neighborhood if they can have the monopoly. Maybe. Verizon froze their FiOS build-out years ago, and may be thawing that a little today, but they didn't want your business much if you weren't already covered. And if you're rural, just fuggedaboudit... they'll leave you to the savagery of the satellite carriers.

Some of it's just company policy... at my old place, I was across the street from a DSL-compatible local node... I could see it from my driveway. But while Verizon had a pretty big DSL customer base in the area (South Jersey), they were no longer supporting new customers. So I had 16 years of satellite Internet as a result. Just one more reason for leaving Jersey, I guess.

Cable was also in the vicinity, but not close enough. They offered to wire me up for about $60,000...

But it is a practical problem for may people right now. My sister drove her shiny new Leaf to my house last year to show it off... unfortunately, that was about 85 miles. No problem, she says, we'll plug it in. I asked her if she had the 240V cable... apparently, that's a $500-something option. So into the 120VAC it went. Hours later, she had to be getting home, and nowhere near enough juice to get home. But she could make it to Cherry Hill, where there was a Nissan dealer that at least had a Level 2 charger... so that was only an extra hour on an hour and 20 minute drive. Far as I know, they stopped including support for the CHAdeMO high voltage DC charging interface on the Leaf, at least on the East Coast. Not sure you'd find a charging station anyway, but that 480V@100A or so is where you just start to get the ability to charge on the road in a practical way.

First of all, if you're counting on charging at home, lots of people don't have garage access for overnight charging. This might be mitigated by charging at work, but that's all of a sudden going to challenge the available power distribution for those areas. And that's adding to the peak power problem. And the average parking garage doesn't have 250-500kW service. Might work well in places like Phoenix AZ, where a shaded parking spot could become a shaded solar parking spot.

The next problem is overall power. If we did replace every ICE car with a BEV, we'd just about double the electrical demand of the USA. Just for cars, not even factoring in trucks, planes, and trains. Where is all that grid power coming from? And we'll need grid upgrades to deliver it.

And then there's production. Tesla is hoping to be able to supply batteries about 1.5 million BEVs per year from their Gigafactory... it's going to take quite awhile to replace all 250+ million passenger cars. And of course, ability is one thing, desire another. It's not even a stretch to imagine a large population in the US switching from paranoia about the Government coming to take their guns to one about the Government coming to take their cars and trucks.

This succeeds much better going slowly. That also delivers better costs on batteries and the chance of better technologies along the way.