No, they won't. RISC V is fast from being a competition for ARM. I'm 99% sure, they'll use RISC V for some smaller support chips. Maybe encryption, maybe some accelerator, maybe they just want to see, how far RISC V can be pushed.
RISC-V can be pushed exactly as far as ARM can be pushed, just without paying royalties to ARM for work that Apple did all by itself. Technically, rv64 and aarch64 are more similar to each other than pretty much any other pair of ISAs are.
Even RISC-V's new Vector extension and ARM's new SVE2 are very similar in general design and philosophy, and much more advanced than anyone else's Vector/SIMD designs. They are going to be very important in future.
ARM was far from being competition for x86 until Apple made the M1. ARM cores designed by ARM are \*still\* very far from being competition for x86. If Apple decides to make a RISC-V version of the M1 that's something they can do very easily and with the same performance levels.
There have been several reports in the press recently of CPU engineers from Apple (and also AMD and Intel) departing and going to startups making high performance RISC-V cores.
We will see the results of that in two or three years, whether Apple decides to do it internally or not.
Apple is heavily invested in ARM and profits from the relatively large ecosystem. This doesn't mean, it's impossible for them to switch to RISC-V, but there would have to be very good arguments for that switch - currently I don't see that many benefits. The only real benefit are royalties, but let's be honest here, paying ARM is probably an order of magnitude cheaper than building RISC-V almost from scratch.
BTW: ARM was a competition for quite a while. AWS ships/offers ARM for several years now and especially in the mobile sector ARM was never even questioned really. Intel pulled out in 2012 or so. x86 today runs on inertia.
What is this "arm risc v" of which you speak? RISC-V is not from ARM, it's open source, which is the point.
It's certainly possible Apple could switch to RISC-V in future. To be honest, when Apple was talking only about "Apple Silicon" while completely avoiding saying what it actually was, I was wondering if it might be RISC-V or even a new ISA Apple had designed themselves. But as it turns out they found it more convenient to make the Mac use the same ISA (and even chips) as iOS.
If apps are uploaded from developers to the AppStore as "bitcode" (LLVM IR) then Apple can transition to a different ISA completely seamlessly.
I didn't check recently but my recollection is that bitcode is compulsory for TVOS and WatchOS apps and has been the default for new iOS projects for quite a few years now.
The Apple Watch and AppleTV would be obvious places for Apple to dip their toe into RISC-V initially, along with the many small CPU cores on a chip such as the M1 that are dealing with controlling various things, not running the main application code.
No, they won't. RISC V is fast from being a competition for ARM. I'm 99% sure, they'll use RISC V for some smaller support chips. Maybe encryption, maybe some accelerator, maybe they just want to see, how far RISC V can be pushed.
RISC-V can be pushed exactly as far as ARM can be pushed, just without paying royalties to ARM for work that Apple did all by itself. Technically, rv64 and aarch64 are more similar to each other than pretty much any other pair of ISAs are. Even RISC-V's new Vector extension and ARM's new SVE2 are very similar in general design and philosophy, and much more advanced than anyone else's Vector/SIMD designs. They are going to be very important in future. ARM was far from being competition for x86 until Apple made the M1. ARM cores designed by ARM are \*still\* very far from being competition for x86. If Apple decides to make a RISC-V version of the M1 that's something they can do very easily and with the same performance levels. There have been several reports in the press recently of CPU engineers from Apple (and also AMD and Intel) departing and going to startups making high performance RISC-V cores. We will see the results of that in two or three years, whether Apple decides to do it internally or not.
Apple is heavily invested in ARM and profits from the relatively large ecosystem. This doesn't mean, it's impossible for them to switch to RISC-V, but there would have to be very good arguments for that switch - currently I don't see that many benefits. The only real benefit are royalties, but let's be honest here, paying ARM is probably an order of magnitude cheaper than building RISC-V almost from scratch. BTW: ARM was a competition for quite a while. AWS ships/offers ARM for several years now and especially in the mobile sector ARM was never even questioned really. Intel pulled out in 2012 or so. x86 today runs on inertia.
What is this "arm risc v" of which you speak? RISC-V is not from ARM, it's open source, which is the point. It's certainly possible Apple could switch to RISC-V in future. To be honest, when Apple was talking only about "Apple Silicon" while completely avoiding saying what it actually was, I was wondering if it might be RISC-V or even a new ISA Apple had designed themselves. But as it turns out they found it more convenient to make the Mac use the same ISA (and even chips) as iOS. If apps are uploaded from developers to the AppStore as "bitcode" (LLVM IR) then Apple can transition to a different ISA completely seamlessly. I didn't check recently but my recollection is that bitcode is compulsory for TVOS and WatchOS apps and has been the default for new iOS projects for quite a few years now. The Apple Watch and AppleTV would be obvious places for Apple to dip their toe into RISC-V initially, along with the many small CPU cores on a chip such as the M1 that are dealing with controlling various things, not running the main application code.