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Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#141

Post by pvg »

danaliv wrote: post #77
cptskippy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple did a pretty decent job when they transitioned from PPC to x86_64, it has Rosetta to translate PPC to x86. Microsoft and partners released ARM based Windows Laptops this year that can run Win32 apps in emulation. What's stopping Apple from shipping Macbooks with a custom SoC that can run existing Apps in emulation until developers can recompile? I would argue that most Air and Macbook owners aren't developers a…

And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.

It does matter that the new processor is a lot more powerful and faster than the old processor. This wouldn't be the case this time.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#142

Post by SyneRyder »

Skunkleton wrote: post #47
jimrandomh wrote: post #30

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel. It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable; given the IP situation, it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip, and any move away from x86_64 is going to require significant work by thi…

If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. We could end up with another situation similar to the Power->x86 transition that happened back in 2006. Or it could be nothing. This is a pretty thin article.

> ...Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance...

I was just listening to a Windows Weekly podcast about that, and its limited to 32-bit x86 binaries only, no 64-bit support. They also said its "unusable" for 32-bit apps (in particular Chrome), because you can watch the system drawing the windows of x86 apps on the screen.

Watching the video, they seem to be exaggerating a bit with "unusable", but Chrome does look sluggish, and the startup of "DrRacket" and its window redraw does look very slow too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYcCSRMkVI&t=60m55s

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#143

Post by monocasa »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #111
monocasa wrote: post #87

A transition to aarch64 would provide a unique challenge to Apple. The other transitions (68k->PPC, and PPC->x86) brought with them nearly an order of magnitude increased raw performance, which let them paper over some of the emulation overhead in Rosetta or their 68k emulator. They won't have the same intrinsic benefit working for them this time; it's hard to beat Intel at raw performance, especially single threaded…

It’s doable for them. For one thing, even their iPhone chips are currently nipping at the heels of Intel’s low-tdp mobile CPUs, exceeding some ULV parts in performance. For another, they could just push all the difficult stuff into specialized coprocessors. Wrap that into system frameworks and nobody will ever know.

I think they'll get between 5 and 10 percent of Intel by then, but that still means that an x86 emulator is punching light, even before you get into emulation overhead.

By comparison, the 68k emulator on PPC wasn't even a JIT. It just interpreted 68k machine code, and even then it was still 2x faster than a native 68k.

Moore's law really helped them.with their previous transitions, but Moore ain't cashing checks like he used to.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#144

Post by philwelch »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #51
X-Istence wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PPC -> Intel transition also happened, and yes devs had to do work to make it happen, but it doesn't mean it is unheard of or impossible.

To be fair, their PPC-on-Intel emulation that let old versions run of apps (and the entirety of OS9, IIRC) was a technical marvel on a number of levels - especially considering the hardware limitations of the early chips.

Mac OS 9 never ran on Intel. That was a separate migration path, where Mac OS X would run a Mac OS 9 VM, but this "Classic" experience never made it past PPC.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#145

Post by endorphone »

btian wrote: post #27
justherefortart wrote: post #4

Great, we can go back to the macrumors nonsense about how this PPC is "just as fast" as the x86 days. With their focus on iOS vs MacOS, this doesn't surprise me. MacOS will simply die once they port their tools to iOS. Terrible choice IMO.

Except PPC was Motorola and IBM, not Apple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#146

Post by jernfrost »

mcphage wrote: post #52
jimrandomh wrote: post #30

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel. It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable; given the IP situation, it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip, and any move away from x86_64 is going to require significant work by thi…

> significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today I dunno, I feel like the writing has been on the wall for Apple to switch to their own ARM chips, for 3 or 4 years now. At first it was "yeah maybe someday", but by this point, I'm just surprised they're waiting until 2020. I was hoping the first ARM Macbooks would be this summer. (Really, last su…

Agree this was obviously something that was going to happen. My prediction was 2019 tough. My thoughts was that they probably wanted to get more developers over to using bitcode first as well as ARM being almost at desired performance but not quite there yet.

In 2020 I doubt anyone will see any problems with ARM performance on a desktop or laptop.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#147

Post by otterley »

xaduha wrote: post #137
otterley wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it turns out not to be based on the ARM architecture?

What else is there?

x86_64, but of their own manufacture. A fair number of people use MBPs to run Docker containers and other Linux/Windows VMs; to ask them to sacrifice this functionality would be to risk a fairly significant user population.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#149

Post by jmull »

OnMyPhone wrote: post #115
jweir wrote: post #24

Apple does have a good record of moving their OS and software from different architectures. 68XXX to PPC to Intel was not a horrible experience. Having gone through three transitions I don't remember a lot of pain - but maybe I am repressing it!

I've been through the PPC to Intel migrations so many times for so many school districts that I'm still fairly amazed at how well it usually went as long as the apps weren't trash. The biggest issues I ran into was always with the low quality edu based applications. So many of the issues we had with those apps were because they were created in Windows and ported half way to OS X, an old PPC version that did something…

Hey, do you remember which title used a special baked in version of Flash?

Asking for friend ;)

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#150

Post by rdsubhas »

jimrandomh wrote: post #30

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel. It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable; given the IP situation, it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip, and any move away from x86_64 is going to require significant work by thi…

> Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel

Not necessary. They only need to ship one model of Mac Mini or any small desktop lineup with Ryzen to improve their negotiating position while still being compatible with the existing x86_64 ecosystem.

So no, this is not merely a negotiation jibe. There are definite long-term prospects.

We're already moving to a mobile-first design and approach world. Having those mobile/tablet apps expand automatically to desktop is the next logical conclusion. As an app developer, there is nothing better than write-once-run-everywhere, and the cascading effects of that on the whole Apple ecosystem and future consumer audience is hard to understate. Keeping aside power, efficiency, device prices, opportunity costs and much more.

> significant work by third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today.

Definitely not today. Its been speculated for many years now ever since the A4 chips, and its still not official news. Usual "people who don't want to be identified". If or when this becomes official news, most partners would be like about time, because everyone is in one way or another working on convergence and multi-device. Adobe and Microsoft are examples of pivoting many of their desktop businesses successfully to cloud and apps already.

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