Will Apple be interested in ARM's newest gadget processors?

If I were an Apple chip engineer, I’d be interested in an announcement today by ARM, the company that designs processors which are used by licensees in all sorts of gadgets.

Today, ARM is announcing that it has created two powerful designs for microprocessors that can be used in low-power devices. Both are versions of ARM’s newest microprocessor core, the Cortex-A MPCore, which is a computing brain that ARM has licensed to 15 chip makers over the past 18 months.

Now ARM is creating two versions of the chip in a project dubbed Osprey. One of them has two cores and runs at 2 gigahertz, the fastest-performance processor that the Cambridge, England-based company has ever designed. That chip consumes only 1.9 watts of power and is about three times faster than Intel’s fastest available Atom microprocessor, which is the heart of most netbooks, or web-surfing computers that are smaller than laptops.

The second chip design operates at 800 megahertz and consumers about half a watt of power. ARM has licensees for these designs and it expects that the first chips using them will appear in the first half of 2010, said Nandan Nayampally, director of CPU marketing at ARM.

Apple is rumored to be using its recently acquired PA Semi engineers to design an ARM-based microprocessor that is specific for Apple’s needs. They are reportedly working on a chip for a tablet computer. Most likely, if they use an ARM design, they would likely pick the low-power 800-megahertz processor.

If the Apple engineers want to use the Osprey processor, Apple would license the design from ARM, which has a “hard macro” available. That is a circuit design that Apple’s engineers could plop down on a chip layout. They could then plug in other components in Lego fashion and complete the design of a custom Apple processor. The ARM hard macros are designed so that customers can quickly get them into the market.

ARM won’t comment on Apple’s plans. But it’s fun to speculate, and these ARM designs tell us that Apple — and a bunch of other gadget makers — will probably come out with some cool gadgetry in the first half of 2010. Nayampally said that we can expect to see the designs in a wide variety of gadgets, including photocopiers, computers, netbooks, printers, consumer electronics devices, servers and portable media devices.

Nayampally said that the Osprey processors will be able to run apps such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Air, and Firefox without much problem — something that older generation ARM devices can’t do. Clearly, these ARM chips are able to run Windows 7. It’s too bad Microsoft didn’t make Windows 7 compatible with the ARM processors.

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