There’s a report that Apple is working on a version of an ARM SoC that could replace Intel chips in their full service Macs.  Since iOS and OS/X share the same code-base, similar to Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 from Microsoft, creating a port of OS/X to run on the ARM architecture is not much of a stretch, ultimately.

While the Bloomberg reports states that it won’t happen before 2017, with the announcement by ARM of the Cortex A50 64-bit series cores and Apple having a full design license from ARM, which allows them to design their own versions using ARM’s instruction set the the timing of this leak report seems opportune.

The rumors of Apple wanting to ditch Intel have been swirling for years now and if AMD was anything close to competently run they would probably be running the latest round of Macbooks.   For this report to make sense, however, Apple would have to buy a GPU design house of some repute.  Intel has yet to prove that they can credibly produce a chip that operates in a mobile device that, frankly, doesn’t suck.

I’m sure the boys in Cupertino are looking carefully at what AMD will pull off in the next 12 months in terms of their APUs and the ability of them to up the performance ante because any successful marriage of AMD’s Radeon technology with ARM instruction sets would signal there is a real solution out there that doesn’t involve licensing PowerVR GPU cores anymore.