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First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

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Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#31

Post by Hamuko »

cable2600 wrote: post #5
kevsim wrote: post #3

Possibly stupid question - does Apple switching to ARM mean the death of Bootcamp?

Possible so, unless Apple makes the ARM chip run Intel code. Windows is overrated now and only Windows 10 matters at this point in time. For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it. I think Bootcamp might work for ARM based Linux and the ARM version of Windows 10. At least Raspberry PIs that are ARM based can run those.

>For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it.

Is there any point in a $150 computer, especially if it's $150 including Windows?

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#32

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #25

Can anyone explain why Apple would be dropping Intel and doing ARM instead, instead of just, you know, doing their own thing ? I find it hard to believe either that ARM is the (globally optimal) pinnacle of instruction set / CPU architecture possible, and that a $1tn company can afford to spin up its own CPU production line (competitor to Intel, a $250b company) but not its own CPU design department (competitor to AR…

[deleted]

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#34

Post by jsnell »

tomp wrote: post #25

Can anyone explain why Apple would be dropping Intel and doing ARM instead, instead of just, you know, doing their own thing ? I find it hard to believe either that ARM is the (globally optimal) pinnacle of instruction set / CPU architecture possible, and that a $1tn company can afford to spin up its own CPU production line (competitor to Intel, a $250b company) but not its own CPU design department (competitor to AR…

The instruction set matters less for performance than people think. But it does matter a lot for the ecosystem: low-level hyper-optimized libraries for certain operations (think BLAS), tooling, developers understanding how to best write for it, etc. Creating all of that will take a long time no matter how much money you throw at it. For ARM, that ecosystem is probably the second best in the world, and in particular Apple has been building it up for themselves for more than a decade since the first iPhone.

Additionally, sharing the ISA means that the ARM reference cores will always be available as a backstop if Apple's custom chips start running into trouble for whatever reason. IIRC, Qualcomm was doing a lot of hopping between full custom cores and ARM reference ones depending on which one happened to work better some particular year.

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#35

Post by loser777 »

tomp wrote: post #25

Can anyone explain why Apple would be dropping Intel and doing ARM instead, instead of just, you know, doing their own thing ? I find it hard to believe either that ARM is the (globally optimal) pinnacle of instruction set / CPU architecture possible, and that a $1tn company can afford to spin up its own CPU production line (competitor to Intel, a $250b company) but not its own CPU design department (competitor to AR…

ISAs are somewhat orthogonal to performance these days, so this move is more or less switching to Apple CPU designs. Apple has rapidly iterated and improved in-house designs since basically the A4 iPad.

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#36

Post by nojito »

Hamuko wrote: post #31
cable2600 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible so, unless Apple makes the ARM chip run Intel code. Windows is overrated now and only Windows 10 matters at this point in time. For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it. I think Bootcamp might work for ARM based Linux and the ARM version of Windows 10. At least Raspberry PIs that are ARM based can run those.

> For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it. Is there any point in a $150 computer, especially if it's $150 including Windows?

Of course. You can get great deals from used/refurbished business laptops for that price.

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#37

Post by snazz »

benologist wrote: post #19
Chernobog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that an ARM version of Windows 10 exists, why do you say "almost definitively"?

People mostly dual-boot so they can access software they need that isn't on macOS, but it isn't available on ARM Windows either so why would Apple care to foster a nascent competing platform?

Additionally, the importance of this use-case (from Apple's perspective) has decreased significantly since they originally developed Boot Camp. While I'm sure that many people do run Windows on Mac hardware, the percentage of Mac owners who do this is likely dropping significantly (if I remember correctly, there was a statistic about this in a comment on another thread about ARM Macs).

Re: First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

#40

Post by mamon »

Hamuko wrote: post #24
Chernobog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that an ARM version of Windows 10 exists, why do you say "almost definitively"?

Windows 10 ARM is so useless that there's really no reason to Boot Camp it.

But what if someone wants to Boot Camp ARM Linux?
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