Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

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

#291

Post by efficax »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253
egypturnash wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has done this twice already. 680x0 to PowerPC, then PowerPC to Intel. Adobe's come along on both of these.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

There's no reason to think that the ARM chips they use won't be as powerful as their intel equivalents in a few years.

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

#292

Post by Bud »

pducks32 wrote: post #180
wlesieutre wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still very skeptical of the “Mac that can run iOS apps” concept. Tim Cook has been pretty unambiguous in his statements about Mac vs iPad. https://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/16/tim-cook-no-converged-m... >We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad, because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the c…

They may never release it but no doubt they have it. There are iMacs in Cupertino running macOS on ARM and there are iPads running macOS. During the PPC transition it was pretty obvious that Apple had been building OS X to work on Intel for a while secretly.

It's not like it was a big stretch: Mac OS X came directly from NeXTStep, which had already been ported to Intel wayyyyy back in the NeXT days.

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

#293

Post by partiallypro »

dwighttk wrote: post #122
iliaznk wrote: post #85

Is Apple competent enough to build an equally powerful CPU? Or is it a no-brainer for the kind of money they got?

Apple's Cash (77B) is about 1/3 of Intel's Market Cap (224B), maybe they could just buy Intel.

Good luck getting that by antitrust laws.

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

#294

Post by laythea »

Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

Whats the big deal? We all write code that is cross platform, don't we? :)

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

#295

Post by 0x0 »

I'm not going to miss Intel ME.

I am going to miss running windows and linux VMs, and commercial software by microsoft, adobe, and blizzard. I'm also going to miss hand-optimized x86_64 assembly variants of ffmpeg, lame, x265, nodejs/v8, java hotspot, and more.

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

#296

Post by awat »

It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this. Last time around users got a compatibilty layer in Rosetta to bridge compatibilty between Power Pc applications on Intel. I would imagine that would be the case this time but some of the questionable changes in terms of user friendliness (imho) in the recent past removing headphone jack etc. makes me wonder if this will be a cold switch for older software.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

TheCoreh wrote: post #277
otterley wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> x86 really has nothing going for it architecture wise. It just has a market because Intel makes fast chips that run existing software. People buy computers to run software. If they can't run their existing software on it, the computer has no value. Just like with the original PPC-to-Intel transition, where Apple provided a PPC emulator on Intel, if they go with ARM, Apple will have to provide Intel-to-ARM translati…

Both Windows and Linux have ARM builds available. The emulation for legacy x86 Windows apps can happen inside the virtual machine.

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by Bud »

squarefoot wrote: post #179
lima wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP/licensing.

And cost. Making something you can license to others and/or sell to 250000 users each year has a completely different cost compared to something you use only on your 20000 machines (source: [1]). Macs are already overpriced, I don't know how much Apple could sustain an in-house production of proprietary chips without hitting their users; they're probably going to ARM. [1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=p…

And the fact that Apple can already beat x86 on speed per unit of electricity with its own architecture.

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

#299

Post by drham »

Bud wrote: post #281
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.

Faster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.

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

#300

Post by Lramseyer »

Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their software - that the high end mac pro systems started seeing Intel chips in them.

Microsoft started down that path last year with Windows 10 on ARM, and Intel had some legal issues with that - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this.

Post reply on HN