They talked about virtualization but they only showed Parallels Desktop. Is just a virtualization layer for x86 on ARM or are they going to provide something like Hyper V on Windows?
Parallels Desktop is virtualization. How do you mean?
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have said something (rehashed) about the A12Z: "it performs better than the CPUs currently shipping in the Mac mini by X% in Y benchmark". I'm not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe minds…
> Not divulging their hand may be a thing. But they could at least have Let's say that the new numbers are mindblowingly good. So then what? Nobody buys anything from them until next year because they're all waiting? Yikes. This way fewer people will be mortified of the idea of buying something right now instead of waiting.
AKA the Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#313> Apple will release the first Mac with Apple silicon end of this year, and it expects the transition to take two years. That's more than twice as long as the transition from PPC. Sounds like they've not yet figured out how to do high-end. Hopefully, they won't be as quick to drop support on the $6k 2019 Mac Pro as they were on the 2005 Power Mac G5 quad (<4 years from release to unsupported by OS X).
What? PPC transition took 4+ years until Snow Leopard was released. You're gonna see macs across the line being moved over to Apple chips Q4 and Q1
The actual hardware transition was only a year, OS support is separate.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#314I'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 don't think they even used the term "ARM" at any point. They're calling it "Apple's silicon," and they acknowledged it's the same as what iPhone and iPad use. But I thought it was interesting how they seemed to avoid the term. It's probably just a matter of avoiding getting too "techy" and marketing.
But this is WWDC...
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#315Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated. Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.
I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.
Good riddance.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#316Will I still be able to use my favourite scripting language, say Ruby, on macOS?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#317I'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'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers.
The fact that all the demoes were on their top-of-line most-expensive machines fell very weird to me. "Look at this amazing performance" would be great if the demo was on a Macbook Air.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#318This 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.
On the other hand, it probably doesn't use much CPU just because it's single threaded. No game ever uses more than 10% of my 16-thread CPU. But that also means that emulation could seriously tank single-thread performance and ruin the game.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#319Apple has a chance here to go all in and make Apple ARM platform what Intel is today and standard ARM wasn't.
If they came out and said here's an open Mac platform with the ability to run macOS, Windows or Linux , open hardware specs, open source drivers and the ability to install whatever you want wherever you want it, I think most people will back it even though initially it'll be painful from a performance and transition standpoint.
But knowing Apple of the recent past or just be more and more closed, limited and Apple or nothing deal.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#320I'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'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. It's the CPU in the iPad Pro, performance numbers are out there in the wild. The only big change is the RAM. This isn't a retail product, it's a developer kit. When they release retail Macs I'm sure there will be some performance numbers.
There's still a huge difference in TDP. The iPad probably has a TDP of maybe 10 watts? The Mac Mini Intel CPU's have 65 watt TDP's. They can deliver more power and cooling to the 12Z than in an iPad and it should result in much higher performance.