OSX (now MacOS) was built and running on PowerPC and Intel for years before Intel Macs were released. I assume the same was true before they released the Apple silicon chips.
Yeah but they weren’t running both in the same device at the same time.
PPC -> Intel they just recompiled their OS and fixed it up for the x86 platform, then the same for Intel -> ARM
They did not have a laptop with an x86 processor and a PPC at the same time… though there are some hillariously bespoke accellerator cards from back in the day to do all sorts of strange things.
That said, laptops are full of microcontrollers with firmware, lots of those will be atmega, st32, 6502 and the like. Things like a WLAN or WAN card will be a little ARM soc of some flavour.
So it really depends on where you draw the line. If its executing the main workload, I’d say thats the CPU, everything else is a microcontroller enabling it to do that
OSX (now MacOS) was built and running on PowerPC and Intel for years before Intel Macs were released. I assume the same was true before they released the Apple silicon chips.
Yeah but they weren’t running both in the same device at the same time.
PPC -> Intel they just recompiled their OS and fixed it up for the x86 platform, then the same for Intel -> ARM
They did not have a laptop with an x86 processor and a PPC at the same time… though there are some hillariously bespoke accellerator cards from back in the day to do all sorts of strange things.
That said, laptops are full of microcontrollers with firmware, lots of those will be atmega, st32, 6502 and the like. Things like a WLAN or WAN card will be a little ARM soc of some flavour.
So it really depends on where you draw the line. If its executing the main workload, I’d say thats the CPU, everything else is a microcontroller enabling it to do that