“it’s hard to imagine Apple using anything other than an ARM-based processor in there.”
I guess the author isn’t all that knowledgable about processors. The Intel Atom processor is a fantastic processor of the same electrical power but isn’t brian damaged as is the ARM.
The ARM architecture is a good choice for “deeply embedded” apps, like phones, PDA’s and the like, but when you want to run a lot more s/w with demand-paged VM, etc.... we start realizing that ARM isn’t the best way to go. It isn’t so much that the ARM is brain damaged as the reality of when we want to field a phone with all sorts of whizzy features AND we want the battery to last two days in your pocket... choices simply have to be made. MMU’s, FPU’s etc - they have to be left behind.
The ARM’s big advantage is that it really has the lowest power consumption out there (and the current ARM vs. last year’s Atom still gave the ARM the advantage on power consumption, especially when we take the additional chips used with an Atom into consideration), but when we start talking of Windows/OS X as a operating environment, we start expecting more out of the CPU than in the phone/PDA space. The next gen of Atom will take care of this issue tho, and that’s why I’d go with an Atom solution to a tablet over an ARM.