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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

#881

Post by krylon »

maxerickson wrote: post #140
jononor wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they wanted to go x86 they would just buy VIA? I think it will be aarch64

Without meaning to comment on whether it is likely or not, they could also easily buy AMD. (Price tag would be in the ballpark of $15-20 billion, 3 months of income for Apple)

I vaguely remember that the licensing agreement between Intel and AMD (Intel licenses x86 to AMD, AMD licenses x86_64 to Intel) expires if AMD gets bought. Apple could renegotiate, but it would not be straightforward, I think.

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

#882

Post by randallsquared »

bwat49 wrote: post #660
randallsquared wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, having the setting doesn’t make it work. Oh, it works some of the time. In order to make it work MOST of the time, you’ll need to change it in more than one place, at least in X11. And Wayland doesn’t play nice with nvidia, yet. (Not implying who is at fault).

I've never had to change it in more than one place on my xps 13

I never got it working all over the system in ubuntu 17.10 (I just resigned myself to testing scroll direction in each app), but in 16.04, there were XKB options, Unity settings, separate Gnome settings (because Gnome ignored the X11-level scrolling!), separate KDE settings (though KDE at least obeyed the base X11 options), and at least an app or two that had their own settings, or used some lib that implemented its own scrolling and also didn't have options to control this.

The thing is, though, desktop linux users are just used to this. Your choices boil down to:

1) do a lot of research and setup and then constant maintenance to restore settings that updates casually break, and understand that there will still be exceptions and gaps, or

2) try to stay inside the lines of Gnome, or Unity, or whatever ElementaryOS calls their graphical shell, and ignore the thousands of applications that do not match the look and feel of your chosen environment.

I keep going back and trying desktop linux every few years since switching from Gentoo to Mac in 2003, and sometimes I use it exclusively as my personal machine for months at a time, but in the end, frustration always drives me back into Apple's arms. :(

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

#883

Post by imtringued »

TheCoreh wrote: post #309
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?

They are absurdly competent with CPU design. The A series chips are already matching or even surpassing the performance of lower tier Intel chips. Keep in mind these chips were first introduced IIRC in 2011 with the iPhone 4S, are designed to be passively cooled (no fans) and are limited by the battery constraints of iPhones and iPads. They could conceivably 'scale them up' for laptops and desktops and get a signific…

Keep in mind that the Geekbench benchmark measures the unthrottled performance. Whether the phone is passively cooled or has a 200 TDP Fan strapped to it doesn't matter.

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

#884

Post by briandear »

Vel0cityX wrote: post #691
npunt wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2/3s of all PR activity on Github is on a Mac, for what it's worth. Certainly the platform punches above its weight relative to market share. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/102/?time=2...

That's because most GitHub activity is by frontend web devs. What about the rest of the world.

Those stats also don’t include GitHub Enterprise..

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

#885

Post by Cthulhu_ »

edwinyzh wrote: post #782
zarkov99 wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the "I preferred Windows" part. Windows right now is the most infuriating piece of software I can imagine for a developer. Forced upgrades? Forced advertisement? Gigantic, expensive SDKs with incomprehensible versioning and install times measured in hours, no standard library installation facilities, no standard build facilities, a default compiler that is markedly inferior to the alternatives, i…

I don't understand you guys, it significantly depends on the programming language you use, what you said would apply to certain languages only, for example we use Delphi and Delphi runs only on Windows, I believe c# programmers are in a similar boat too.

For C# there's .NET Core nowadays, which iirc is a crossplatform JVM / JDK-like thing, runs on linux and everything too.

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

#886

Post by amdavidson »

mrpippy wrote: post #780
obmelvin wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see an argument that Apple should make a tool like Homebrew themselves or official support Homebrew development (maybe they do, haven't looked), but including it in the app store would just be confusing. Plus, I can type 'brew install ' far faster than I could type into the search bar and make the necessary clicks to install.

Apple supports and hosts MacPorts https://www.macosforge.org

macOS Forge shut down in 2016. All those links are to the new homes of the projects.

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

#887

Post by romanovcode »

nunez wrote: post #807
npunt wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2/3s of all PR activity on Github is on a Mac, for what it's worth. Certainly the platform punches above its weight relative to market share. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/102/?time=2...

I don't trust that for two reasons: 1) There is a lot of cargo-culting around the MacBook because hurr durr Windows is terribad (though, to be fair, Docker does work better natively with OS X than Windows, even under WSL), and 2) Most companies give their developers the choice of a MacBook or the shittiest Windows machines known to man (because of irresistable volume deals from Windows OEMs). I bet the spread would b…

Docker has a native Windows client for like a year now. Just FYI

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

#889

Post by BlackLotus89 »

saagarjha wrote: post #382
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #212

Is this maybe why they are looking for Linux kernel developers? Tim Pritlove predicted this move for some years now on his freakshow(.fm). Anyway the only interesting thing to me is if they will share a codebase between macOs and ios or if they will create something new and not based on darwin. Maybe they will take the step steve didn't want and switch to linux.

I seriously doubt this will happen. Why would they throw away three decades of work that's known to work on both x86 and ARM?

You are probably right. I myself however am curious why they would need linux kernel devs.

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

#890

Post by pertymcpert »

SZJX wrote: post #842

So Apple seems to be willing to give up on the developer market almost entirely, and will turn the Macs into multimedia centers just as iPads then? Maybe that's indeed where the majority of their revenue lies, and they couldn't care less whether fewer developers buy their Macs if that means more home users buy them. But still, I doubt whether it will be the right move in the long run. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wou…

The vast majority of apps don't use things like inline assembly or rely on architecture specific features, so it's just a recompile.
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