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Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

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Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#131

Post by marricks »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #102

I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…

I wonder if they're holding them for the actual hardware release in Fall? They could still be deciding the tradeoff between battery life and raw power.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#132

Post by macintux »

toyg wrote: post #106
jdhn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the market for a new laptop, and if I knew how long the Intel macs would be supported, I could see myself picking one up. Unfortunately, nothing was said about that so I guess I'm holding off.

They said the transition should take 2 years. I wouldn't expect much more than that.

Disagree. He said Intel Macs would be supported for "years to come" and that they had more in the pipeline. They'll be supported for significantly longer than 2 years.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#133

Post by lasagnaphil »

monocasa wrote: post #30
ogre_codes wrote: post #11

This is a demo so take with huge grain of salt, but the x86 performance looks solid... better than I expected considering it's based on an iPad CPU.

IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.

If the Tomb Raider game was actually running on a A12Z system (without any external GPU - note that this is the same CPU/GPU on the iPad Pro!), then that demo is actually really impressive, even if the game settings are set to low-quality and the framerate is a bit choppy.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#134

Post by mbreese »

philjohn wrote: post #24
cmer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious that they said nothing about virtualizing Windows. That can’t be a mistake or oversight. Odd.

Indeed - only talked about Linux, of which there are of course ARM versions available.

Yeah, but what I care about is being able to run Docker with x86 containers so that I can use the same containers on my laptop as my servers.

Not all packages are available in ARM flavors.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#135

Post by ashearer »

mrkstu wrote: post #85

Rosetta 2 - the interesting bit was that it was going to pre-translate binaries instead of at runtime. The implications for actual VM emulation is that Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation. They touched on it briefly with the emulation technologies bit, but it looks like it will be separate from, and likely much less performant than Rosetta.

The same slide also mentioned supporting JIT translation (for x86 web browsers and Java), so Rosetta doesn't run only at installation time.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#137

Post by scarface74 »

jccalhoun wrote: post #19

Tim Cook just said they have new intel macs in the pipeline. Those will go over like a lead balloon.

Apple announced the Mac in 1984 and sold Apple // based computers until 1993.

Apple announced the PPC in 1994 and sold new 68K Macs for 3 years at least.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#138

Post by j0hnml »

ericzawo wrote: post #8

I really wonder if this will result in the Mac-ification of iPad. Would love to finally run a MacOS environment on a tablet.

Also interesting that the dev kits use the same chip as the latest iPad Pros (A12Z). I’d love to see the two OSes merge to some extent because I love writing on the tablet but find iPadOS not the best for general dev work.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#139

Post by YetAnotherNick »

aldanor wrote: post #40

So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..

I think for this reason they are not going to discontinue intel based macs as x86 is the default for many high performance software.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#140

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ogre_codes wrote: post #98
monocasa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.

I think your expectations for what emulation is capable of are set a bit high. The fact that it is able to emulate a game that's a few years old at decent frame rate is more than acceptable. You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.

I mean, if I had things my way they wouldn't be switching to ARM at all and emulation wouldn't be necessary, so I don't think it's wrong to be skeptical.

> You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.

Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.

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