Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip
I wonder how long it will be before Apple releases a laptop with an A-X chip.<p>They’re already shipping their custom T2 chips in their laptops. The compiler toolchain can build great binaries for their A chips. They’ve swapped CPU architecture before and the modern Mach binary format can hold versions of the executable built for different architectures.<p>They will probably need a Rosetta equivalent to emulate x86 for all the applications that are slow to switch. That might be tricky because of the huge surface area of the x86 instruction set. But I think it will only be a matter of time. It might also explain why they have kept the MacBook and MacBook Air product lines - they might want one of them to stay with intel’s cpus and the other to switch to their A* chips going forward. Or maybe they’ll just wait another generation or two and switch CPUs across their whole line in one go.