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

> If they wanted to go x86 they would just buy VIA?

In theory, but then VIA is a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics Group, so they'd need to either negotiate the sale with an entity with which they've locked horns in the past or buy an entire petrochemical group???

They'd probably have an easier time buying AMD.

It was just a stream of consciousness and I was planning on editing it but got distracted. It also wasn't formatted very well. My mistake.

I'm sure this has been going on for a long time behind the scenes. That is what happened when the PPC -> x86 transition became public. Since Apple has it's own ARM chips/fab, I wonder if ARM is where they are going? It would make sense from a couple different points of view: Lower power use and security. Can there be equivalence between the two architectures, meaning would similar CPUs net you a similar workload?

There is much to like about the iOS app store, but there also is much to dislike. Apple is the gatekeeper here, and if they don't like your app, you are out of luck. That's not the case with MacOS, at least not yet. You can still write what ever kind of app you desire for what ever your client base may pay for and Apple can't really do much to stop you. Merging iOS and MacOS would need to address this.

Finally I use the command line a lot. I don't have access to that on my tablet or phone unless I jailbreak it which has it's own risks with doing so. If Apple decides this is no longer acceptable, that will certainly change my choices for getting work done.

But what -- and work with me here -- if the processor is slimmer. With rounded corners.

That's a good joke and I laughed, but this seriously understates the power of Apple's ARM chips. They are pretty impressive. To put this on the pizza scale, Apple is a lot further along than any individual pizza maker. They're a strong regional pizza chain, at the very least.

Single threaded CPU performance improvements are pretty much tapped out at this point. Process improvements have slowed to a glacial crawl (compared to the past), clockspeed can't really increase much while maintaining the ability to be air cooled, and IPC is mostly mined out. Intel probably has the best processor cache in the industry, and adding more just isn't yielding much for general purpose applications (can't really speak about multi-tenant environments or other specialized applications).

I'd guess, but I don't know, that Apple's performance growth is coming from two places:

1. More multi-threading. Moble chips in general have been getting more parallel over time. It's pretty easy to construct synthetic benchmarks that benefit from this; it's less easy for general purpose applications, although they are coming along.

2. The GPU is improving. It seems like there is a lot of headroom here to improve. Apple's GPU is almost certainly substantially better than Intel's. This isn't really a huge problem for Intel, because for people who care, they can always get a discrete GPU. Super powerful GPUs can be very impactful for certain applications, but they just don't have general applicability.

In general, I'm pretty skeptical that Apple's CPUs are improving in the necessary areas to enable them to switch their pro lines. Moving over their Air and Macbook products to in house chips seems pretty straight forward.