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

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

#341

Post by Aloha »

lykr0n wrote: post #328
CharlesW wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors… Arguably, the A11 Bionic is already faster than mainstream desktop CPUs. "The iPhone 8 even edged out the score from the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with a 7th-generation Core i5 processor. That notebook notched 9,213. Is Geekbench 4 really comparable from phone to desktop? According to the founder of Geekbench, John Poole, 'the short is ans…

Geekbench is a poor tool. Maybe for simple mathematical operations, but x86-64 has a larger instruction set than what the A11 supports

I dont think there is strong connection between a larger instruction set, and performance.

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

#342

Post by tinus_hn »

jluxenberg wrote: post #119
pertsix wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to emulate iOS apps on macOS will be a boon for Xcode developers.

iOS apps do not run via emulation on macOS; they are compiled for x86_64 and run as a normal process.

And it’s actually a pre that every iOS app works on multiple architectures. If Apple ever wants to change iOS to run on a different type of CPU it’ll be easy.

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

#343

Post by hinkley »

sydney6 wrote: post #313
mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

> I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. But CPU/GPU aren't the only chips Apple is sourcing from 3rd party. Think wireless modems like WiFi, LTE, etc.

I don’t know what the current status is but they have definitely looked at making their own baseband chips before.

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

#344

Post by sagitariusrex »

The thing I've come to realize over the past couple years is that the dream of performant open hardware is still beyond reach for at least a decade or two.

But this is probably the next best thing to have. A company that at least tries to be sensitive in terms of privacy and security building their own hardware, albeit not open. I respect Apple for that.

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

#345

Post by wilun »

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…

There are several aspect to the perf hypotheses you make, and I don't see why Apple could not design its own CPU with excellent perfs.

Current Apple best CPUs are already performing very well compared to some Intel CPU. Not the fastest Intel CPU, obviously, but a) Apple Arm implementation is already above all the Arm competitors b) we are talking about an Arm implementation optimized for low energy consumption and other components and functions essential to a high end mobile phone -- and even then it starts to catch up chips that are dissipating more and integrate far less features c) the hypothetical Apple latop/desktop cpu won't be coming today.

From a theoretical pov I see nothing that prevent Apple to achieve what they want. Especially with the kind of money they have, and the kind of team they have to already design chips. Oh btw, the A11 has more transistors than a 4core Skylake. That does not means much, except that we are dealing with the similar kind of projects, and that in that kind of project, the perf and thermal budget you have is not something that suddenly makes the people working on it go: oh my god, but we don't know how to make that, we are only good for mobile phone SoC. I suspect some of Apple employees working on their chips even worked at Intel before...

Another problem with what you say is that the workloads you consider are especially well suited for accelerations, and it is even simpler to compete in this area compared to old school CPU power. You just need bulk compute power, that can come in the form of, at least: vector instructions; GPU; DSP; fixed function acceleration units. Those areas are not especially dominated by Intel.

Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side.

The result of that equation is that I really don't see why Apple could not manage to create high performance CPU to the point of not needing Intel anymore. Maybe at first they would limit to their laptops, and switch the Mac Pro last, but I'm not even sure of that.

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

#346

Post by thothamon »

kccqzy wrote: post #319
thothamon wrote: post #193

Well. We'll see what they do, but Apple had better be very careful. If a lot of OSS software won't run on Apple's new chip, then it becomes very hard for a software developer like myself to stick with Apple. And it is developer energy that sustains the software ecosystem for Apple....including many developers who are in the Mac ecosystem to develop for iOS. This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is…

By definition, if the maintainer of some OSS software doesn't have the time/energy/willingness to make the software run on Apple's new chip, you can do it yourself.

True, but right now I don't have to do it myself. Things like brew just work. If the proposal is to throw away something that works, and add the burden of doing it myself to my to-do list, that doesn't sound at all appealing.

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

#347

Post by thothamon »

edude03 wrote: post #279
thothamon wrote: post #193

Well. We'll see what they do, but Apple had better be very careful. If a lot of OSS software won't run on Apple's new chip, then it becomes very hard for a software developer like myself to stick with Apple. And it is developer energy that sustains the software ecosystem for Apple....including many developers who are in the Mac ecosystem to develop for iOS. This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is…

OSS software can "just" be recompiled though.

In theory yes, but back in the PPC days a lot of stuff was not available even though theoretically it could have been.

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

#348

Post by djrogers »

sydney6 wrote: post #313
mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

> I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. But CPU/GPU aren't the only chips Apple is sourcing from 3rd party. Think wireless modems like WiFi, LTE, etc.

Close, but Apple already produces it's own WiFi/BT chipsets (the S1/S2 etc SOCs in Apple watches for example, and the W1 chipset in AirPods and new Beats headphones), and is rumored to be working on an LTE/GSM chipset.

I think Apple is intensely interested in controlling the entire stack.

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

#349

Post by collyw »

apetrovic wrote: post #340
Lramseyer wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwar…

There's two problems with that story: first, the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king, and app developers had strong incentive to recompile programs to the new platform. Right now? Not so much. Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such a…

> the famous switch from PowerPC to Intel happened when the desktop was the king,

I though one of the major reasons for the switch to Intel was the power consumption and performance on laptops.

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

#350

Post by 40acres »

This is no surprise, it's in Apple's culture to want to own the stack completely. I wonder how they will execute on this however, Apple's design team is pretty good.. but who do they have doing pre and post silicon validation? Will they go the extra mile someday and build their own fab? There are lots of intricacies to consider when trying to make your own chip. I guess the biggest question is how far is Apple willing to go to have complete control over their product, microprocessors are probably the most capital intensive part of their product.
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