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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

#361

Post by hendersoon »

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…

We pretty much know it'll perform fine in native programs, the only real question is how well the x86 translation layer performs.

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

#362

Post by Ascii2223 »

neilalexander wrote: post #315
originalvichy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This

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

#363

Post by cestith »

I almost didn't want to upvote this because it was at 486 points.

I'm sure anything close to the same performance as the Intel chips will have better battery life, especially since they can put in as fine-grained support for throttling and idling as they want. These should cost them loads less per unit than what Intel's selling them, too. They could cut prices a bit and still have higher margins.

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

#364

Post by blinkingled »

ianmassey wrote: post #354
blinkingled wrote: post #319

Apple 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 tra…

intel's market cap is ~250B. Apple's is ~1.55T. I don't think they want to be what intel is today.

Apple ARM would like to be where Intel ISA as a de-facto platform is today - but not sure what in my comment implied I meant Apple want to be financially where Intel is today.

Also that would not preclude them from being financially where they want to be - more Macs sold at Apple premium - even if they are to run Windows and Linux - still means more Apple hardware sales and more money.

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

#365

Post by nicoburns »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #223
bredren wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just lack of performance numbers, there were no actual products announced. They would have had to tip their hand on a lot of info that is not helpful to customers or their ability to keep selling Intel stuff. One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)

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…

I'm guessing they're not planning on releasing any A12Z products. They kept going on about how "scalable" their platform. I'm betting they launch with a significantly more powerful processor (they could easily double core counts and up clock frequencies for a laptop-class processor) on a next-gen process (i.e. 5nm). They probably don't even know what the performance will be like yet.

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

#366

Post by bgorman »

moduspol wrote: post #174
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 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.

ARM doesn't really matter very much to Apple - Apple designs the micro-architecture and many (most?) of the other SOC components themselves.

With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM

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

#367

Post by Symmetry »

snowwrestler wrote: post #66

My comment from a week ago: "What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23530084

Well, in theory both AMD and ARM use MOESI so it's not as crazy as it would be with Intel's MESIF. But that's a really scary rabbit hole to be going down and I'd be terrified of memory permissions attacks striking at the boundary there. So probably not worth the risk unless each processor gets its own pool of RAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOESI_protocol

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

#368

Post by ogre_codes »

sigjuice wrote: post #168
ogre_codes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so sure, there are a fair number of people who want a machine that will run x86 for various reasons. Windows support/ Linux support. Even considering how impressive x86 VMs looked in the demo, lots of people will prefer using intel silicon for guaranteed compatibility.

Did they say the Linux VMs in the demo were x86? They said "virtualization", which to me, implies ARM Linux.

This is true, it might just be virtualizing ARM, I think I just assumed it was x86 emulation based on the context.

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

#369

Post by floatboth »

Analemma_ wrote: post #67
udev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the cost of the transition mini is.

The last time Apple transitioned to a new architecture, the dev kits were loaners you had to give back.

Did anyone.. "lose" them? :D

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

#370

Post by seek3r00 »

ccmcarey wrote: post #311
seek3r00 wrote: post #301

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?

I meant that we’ve already got Parallels Desktop. I didn’t understand whether they want to introduce something like Hyper-V/WSL on macOS.
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