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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

#401

Post by Someone »

djrogers wrote: post #348
sydney6 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Produces? Are you sure you don’t mean designs?

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

#402

Post by namelost »

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

They could make a Linux distro, a "yellow box" for Linux. I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but if Apple really doesn't want to make computers for software engineers, it doesn't stop them making an OS for software engineers.

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

#403

Post by wbl »

djrogers wrote: post #348
sydney6 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why? A lot of these parts are commodetized. Are they really getting that much better battery life from their own stuff?

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

#404

Post by lostgame »

Bud wrote: post #292
pducks32 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which means it's not a big stretch for iOS, either, since it's built on top of MacOS.

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

#406

Post by vbezhenar »

huebnerob wrote: post #254
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.

Your last point may be a bit of an understatement. It's going to absolutely annihilate x86 virtualization on the Mac. Like, I don't think parallels or VMware will even attempt to write an x86 emulator for ARM, they'll just pack up and leave. But the Mac thrived for a very long time without x86 compatibility, and it can do the same again, virtualization was always kind of a happy accident for us anyway.

There's Windows for ARM, so important Windows applications will be recompiled to ARM and those who stay behind probably can take that performance hit.

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

#407

Post by mlloyd »

abritinthebay wrote: post #378
samayylmao wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate.. While you may trust them more, you can't deny they have had many significant software security issues of late. How could consumers trust the security of their chips?

Given software !== chips and their ARM chips are - hands down - the best on the market... yeah, I'd think people would trust them.

Given the amount of evidence you presented, how could anyone refute your opinion?

OP raised a valid argument - Apple's QC has been crap lately and trending downwards. There's a lot of feedback out on the net to support that line of thinking.

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

#408

Post by aneutron »

adrianmonk wrote: post #400
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 m…

I'm not a chip designer either, but IIRC, the current architectures are actually something similar, whereas the CISC is broken down into custom RISC-ish instructions by a HW layer, which is then executed by the RISC-ish cores.

And while it might be doable (x64 and ARM on the same chip), I think it might not be a smart decision, since some things will not function correctly or will have to be redone (e.g. speculative execution).

I don't know either architectures on a deep understanding level (x64 or ARM), but I have a feeling that there should be some big architectural changes that would prevent x64 code to run on ARM natively.

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

#409

Post by rdsubhas »

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.

> Geekbench 4 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 4000 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-6600U)

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

> iMac (27-inch Retina Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2 GHz (4 cores) | 5683

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

> iPhone 8 | Apple A11 Bionic @ 2.4 GHz | 4217

4217 for Apple A11 @ 2.4Ghz vs 5683 for Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz

Of course, microbenchmarks don't mean much. But the margins are thin enough for users to notice already. Add in more power, more cores, more Ghz, better optimized instruction set, more vertically integrated system, and who knows.

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

#410

Post by eanzenberg »

wbl wrote: post #403
djrogers wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? A lot of these parts are commodetized. Are they really getting that much better battery life from their own stuff?

For performance. They can outcompete against others by moving to bespoke hardware. My iphone x cpu is ~ 13” MBP in performance, which is bonkers.
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