I would imagine apple actually ships hundreds of devices with processors - each dongle and peripheral has at least one.
Re:RISC-V is succeeding
by unfocussed_mike on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @11:21AM
(#30516083)
Yep. There's surely a bunch of uses of RISC-V that have little or nothing to do with the main CPU, even in a conventional machine.
Trust modules, device controllers, smart adapter cables etc.
For what it's worth, Apple always has people on hand monitoring innovations in technology and testing their stack on new hardware, most of which never sees the light of day.
See OS X on Intel being a thing inside Apple for years and years before they decided it should see the light of day.
Re:RISC-V is succeeding
by throwawayboise on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @12:49PM
(#30517340)
NEXTSTEP was multi-architecture even before Apple owned it.
What they plan to do with them is unknown, but Apple has the cash flow to try a lot of things.
I would expect them to quickly adopt it for embedded applications, and experiment with making their own high performance design, including porting MacOS and Rosetta Stone. They can afford to do this much, regardless of whether they end up moving their main CPUs to RISC-V or not.