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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

#571

Post by snowwrestler »

awalton wrote: post #513
Bud wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "But Geekbench..." is not extraordinary evidence. Give me a board where I can do an Apple to apples comparison, booting both under the same revision of the same OS, and running industry standard benchmarks (read: plural), and then we can come to that conclusion.

No one is stopping you from doing that experiment.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. We have some evidence; you're welcome to believe it or not, but unless you supply alternative evidence you're not really making an argument. You're just saying "it might not be true," which is something anyone can say at any time about anything.

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

#572

Post by super_mario »

chuckdries wrote: post #460
electricslpnsld wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but the LLVM toolchain provided by Apple is a bit clunky and missing features relative to what you get from a typical Linux distro.

Macs ship with outdated versions of common bash commands and tools as well. Homebrew goes a long way to fixing this for me.

BASH is outdated, but I compile the latest version and install it in /bin (I have system integrity protection turned off).

Other UNIX utilities are actually standard POSIX ones. If you are used to GNU extensions to these on Linux, then Mac ones may seem outdated, but ironically (macOS kernel is called XNU which stands for X is not UNIX) Mac is certified UNIX, while Linux is only UNIX like.

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

#573

Post by squarefoot »

nnnnnnnnnnnnn wrote: post #316
squarefoot wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might have misread the table at the page you linked. Above the table, it says "Shipments are in thousands of units." According to the table, Apple shipped 20 million notebooks and desktops last year, not 20 thousand.

Doh... Same proportions but yeah, damn language barrier, over here the comma and point meanings are reversed compared to English. Thanks!

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

#574

Post by jamesrcole »

yellow_postit wrote: post #551
reaperducer wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My last couple of jobs have given me no choice aside from a MBP and OS X. They do this because they don't want to manage multiple kinds of machines from an IT perspective. Not that many years ago that was the same reason IT departments would give for only giving people Windows machines.

Apple shot themselves in the foot for this market with the touch bar. It adds such a small amount of utility for annoying every VIM user.

Vim users commonly map escape to caps-lock.

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

#575

Post by lhorie »

snowwrestler wrote: post #561
lhorie wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's this different than going back to PowerPC architecture? When they switched to Intel, I recall there being a lot of talk of benefits to running on the same chips as everyone else. From what I've been hearing lately about Apple, the impression I keep getting is that Apple doesn't think of Mac as a product with a specific target market, but more as a sort of just-a-really-really-big-ipad. The closed garden approac…

> When they switched to Intel, I recall there being a lot of talk of benefits to running on the same chips as everyone else. They switched to Intel first and foremost because PowerPC was not going to get them the performance/power ratio that they wanted. It was holding them back in laptops. For example, Apple never shipped a laptop with a G5 chip because it took so much damn power to run a G5. Intel was basically the…

> most anything important is available through a browser or a native app

I guess that depends on what people think is "important". If by that you mean Facebook and Youtube, sure. But if we mean things like compilers, imho it would be a net loss if the only way to compile anything for any Apple OS was through Xcode/Swift.

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

#576

Post by bb88 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #528
bb88 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only complaint is that if the mac were truly a developer-centric device, I wouldn't need homebrew to install software. It should just be in the apple store for me to download.

I think that'd be a disservice to both developers and non-developers alike. It'd clutter the app store and force developers to use the app store and whatever approval process they decide. I think it would be cumbersome to say the least... * Would you have to install through the app store gui? * How would it manage dependency chains and conflicts (system ruby vs local ruby)? * How about explicit paths or build paramet…

> Would you have to install through the app store gui?

Possibly or not. Ubuntu gives me both a gui and a command line option for apt. Thinking about being able to type "app-store install openssh" gives me goosebumps.

> How would it manage dependency chains and conflicts (system ruby vs local ruby)?

First, that example is a problem for ruby, not for the package manager. Second, software can be in the store statically compiled. Third, apt handles dep management really well. Perhaps that's something apple can learn from?

> How about explicit paths or build parameters?

This is a solved problem in ubuntu.

> How would it handle different shells?

Again, this is a solved problem.

> So I would still say, it's not a developer-centric platform (the Mac)

The question I have is if we deploy on linux, why are we using a mac to develop software on?

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

#577

Post by walshemj »

stiGGG wrote: post #496
deathanatos wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last couple of jobs have given me no choice aside from a MBP and OS X. They do this because they don't want to manage multiple kinds of machines from an IT perspective. (I'm not sure I agree with this, but it is what it is.) Depending on how widespread this is, usage may not reflect actual user desire (though I would wager quite a large number of users either don't care what they're using, or care, but a MBP is ad…

In my second to last company (a web development shop), they had originally the policy that a new developers can choose if he want either a mac, linux or windows machine. When i arrived there it was 75% mac and the rest used linux, not even one had made the choice for windows. After a while some new guys get hired and one of them wanted to use windows. We found out immediately, that this caused a lot of problems, beca…

What was the problem just install an xwindows server (the new bash environment should support it) or just turn on the telnet clinet.

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

#578

Post by saas_co_de »

efficax wrote: post #291
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.

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.

This is true. The rate of progress in CPU performance has slowed to a crawl and will only get slower in the future. Because the pace of innovation of fabs has slowed Intel has also lost their fab lead and GF/Samsung/TSMC should all be very competitive with Intel over the next decade.

Apple is probably looking at all these trends and concluding that they don't really need Intel.

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

#579

Post by ekianjo »

blacklight wrote: post #560

I personally hate close fences with no rooms for customization, and many computer scientists are on the same wavelength. Windows is an awful choice for software development, a job that usually requires a lot of interaction with Unix servers. Microsoft's recent crush for Linux and open source can't fix many years of closed standards, closed protocols, and Embrace-Extend-Exterminate evil culture. And MacOS, even though…

How about the Dell XPS line with official Ubuntu support?

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

#580

Post by walshemj »

KajMagnus wrote: post #557
davidy123 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't easily share media between the Apple ecosystem and others. You can't access some Apple services at all from Linux. There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one. You're giving up an awful lot for the sak…

> what's missing from a modern Linux desktop Networking, printer stuff, graphics stuff that works immediately after installation, without one having to search for various problems & fixes on the Internet. And that doesn't randomly break after kernel upgrades. Because of running into networking & graphics driver problems every now and then (and having to revert to older kernel versions), and problems with printers & d…

Um I have never had to download fixes for networking / graphics Ubuntu worked out of the box for me.
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