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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

#391

Post by htormey »

emodendroket wrote: post #377
htormey wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?” Right now many new desktop apps are just badly ported web apps wrapped in electron. T…

Don't a number of iOS apps use essentially the same technique?

Most if not all of the top 100 mobile apps are native applications.

Hybrid mobile frameworks like Cordova tend to get a bad rap these days especially with the arrival of more performant alternatives like React Native.

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

#392

Post by throwaway84742 »

monocasa wrote: post #339
throwaway84742 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure Rosetta wasn’t an interpreter, and Intel chips were less than 2x the speed of PowerPC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

Their x86 cores were about 5x faster when you accounted for everything. And even though Rosetta was a JIT it ended up running a little slower than the PowerPC chips it was replacing. So to start off with chips that, let's assume are only about 90% of the chips that you're replacing in native code, you're now at least under half the performance of x86 while emulating. And that means half the battery life too.

You’re making the unwarranted assumption that they’ll actually emulate anything. The state of tooling is much better than it was back then, and this time there’s no 32 bit mode to worry about.

According to Anandtech report in 2006, btw, the real world difference was far less than 5x. Indeed, Intel chips had substantially worse FP performance back then, something Apple uses quite a bit in their graphics subsystem.

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

#393

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

bhouston wrote: post #223
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…

Adobe has a lot of stuff that works well on iOS. ARM has neon instructions for SIMD. I think they will be okay. Changing over from one SIMD architecture to another is not that hard. AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay. This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.

I think developers flocked to Intel Macs because it gave them one machine that could run Mac, Linux, Windows in virtual or bootcamp environments. If x86 compatibility goes away, developers may jump ship to Linux or Windows machines.

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

#394

Post by olivermarks »

schappim wrote: post #285
olivermarks wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and it's unlikely my next laptop will be an Apple device...

I was thinking the same thing, but Apple doesn't care. Folks like us do not represent the majority of the market.

exactly. It's a shame... written on old macbook air

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

#395

Post by mywittyname »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #333
feedmeseymour wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO. These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry." Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will…

The niche market of "software developer" is in an interesting position if you include developers who create the apps that Apple needs to sell phones. Clearly "iOS app developer" is only a subset of "software developer" but I think there is only so far down the "consumer tech toy" road they can go without doing longer term damage to their ecosystem

I would think that non-iOS software developers are still a big money maker for Apple. It seems like half of professional developers use Macbooks.

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

#396

Post by DerekL »

Lramseyer wrote: post #300
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 softwar…

> 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.

The switch to Intel started six months [correction: seven months] from the announcement, and took seven months to complete.

June 5th, 2005: Intel switch announced at WWDC

January 10th, 2006: First Intel Macs (MacBook Pro and iMac) released

August 7th, 2006: Mac Pro and Intel Xserve released, last PowerPC Macs discontinued

https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/index-macs-by-timel...

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

#397

Post by wilun »

ssutch3 wrote: post #245
bhouston wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe has a lot of stuff that works well on iOS. ARM has neon instructions for SIMD. I think they will be okay. Changing over from one SIMD architecture to another is not that hard. AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay. This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.

A lot of progress has been made recently in ARM virtualization (see its push into datacenter units). An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM.

Are there extensions with a stronger memory model by at very low cost (matching the one of x86)? If not, we might not get excellent perf with x86 emulated by arm in the multithread & multicore era we are.

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

#399

Post by Turing_Machine »

pvg wrote: post #141
danaliv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This wouldn't be the case this time.

I don't think we can make that assumption here. I would be very surprised if the ARM chips they put in desktops are identical to the ones they put in phones.

For one, the power budget is going to be a lot larger (even for a notebook), and power is roughly equivalent to speed.

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

#400

Post by adrianmonk »

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…

I'm not a chip designer, but how practical would it be for Apple to try to make a CPU that has good hardware support for both ARM and x86/x86-64 binaries?

It's a radical direction, but they are designing the chip by themselves and for themselves, they have deep pockets, and if it worked well it would reduce an important risk.

There are already several chips capable of running multiple instruction sets. Most desktop machines have chips that can run either x86 or x84-64. Some(?) ARM chips have a Thumb mode. So that seems very practical, and obviously there is a bigger "impedance mismatch" when trying to do both x86 and ARM on the same chip, how much worse is it?

If you could do some kind of hardware real-time instruction translation without wasting much silicon and without reducing performance (for x86) that much, it seems like it would take a lot of the pain out of the transition.

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