First thing is, I’d like to stress that this is all extremely speculative, hence the title change for today.
However, the rumor mill is claiming that Apple is going to buy ARM.
This would, obviously, give Apple control of the ARM architecture – and it means that Apple could use that control to shut its competitors out of the smartphone market, or turn to Intel’s latest attempts at smartphone chips.
Some may compare this to Google’s purchase of Agnilux today. However, that’s a very different thing, with Agnilux being a company consisting of engineers with ARM experience, and having no control over the ARM architecture and who can use it. Not only that, but Google may not even be intending this for phones –
If Apple were to buy ARM, the smartphone market could be set back by a couple years, as it may have to switch CPU architectures. The most popular smartphone platforms in the US, outside of the iPhone and Windows Mobile, are mostly architecture independent (BlackBerry using Java, Android using Dalvik,) but there’s not much in the way of good non-ARM smartphone hardware. Intel’s certainly trying, but their attempts look to be slow and power-hungry.
Keep in mind, this may very well be BS. If it’s true, then things are about to get really bad. It may well be false, however.
Source: The Register