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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

#451

Post by kllrnohj »

moduspol wrote: post #379
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

Agreed on all points. I saw speculation elsewhere that this change, along with AWS's addition of Graviton-based (their own ARM processors) instances at much more competitive price points relative to x86, are bound to spearhead the change to "ARM by default." If your devs are already using ARM, and ARM's notably cheaper in the cloud, that's a compelling case. If you're already using Kubernetes / Docker heavily, you're…

This claim doesn't really hold up. The problem here is the vast majority of non-Apple laptops & desktops that are in use. THOSE will still all be x86 for the foreseeable future as ARM CPUs not made by Apple all have terrible per-core performance. Graviton2 compensates by just throwing 64 cores at the problem, but that's not going to do anything for your Electron-based text editor that struggles to use 2 CPU cores in the first place. Or for a typical webpage, which struggles to use more than a single CPU core.

But otherwise as a developer-focused example the 32-core Epyc Rome compiles Build2 faster than the 64-core Graviton 2: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2006047-PTS-EPYC2EC...

That's going to matter when a company is spec'ing out workstations to buy, which are unlikely to have an Apple option on the table at all in the first place, and Amazon isn't going to sell you Graviton2 CPUs to put under your desk, either.

This _could_ be the start of a bigger focus on ARM, definitely, but to really make inroads into what devs use you'll need someone other than Apple to step up to the plate. Or for Apple to become vastly larger than they are in the desktop space. Otherwise we'll all just keep cross-compiling like we have been for the last decade of mobile app development.

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

#452

Post by RandallBrown »

jayd16 wrote: post #244
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.

>how impressive x86 VMs looked You mean that they opened and could run a command line app? I'm not actually sure they implied it was x86.

I guess it's not a VM, but they were running Maya with Rosetta2 weren't they?

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

#453

Post by enos_feedler »

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.

Maybe that lives them open to switch the internal instruction set to risc-v down the road without a naming issue.

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

#454

Post by kps »

0x0 wrote: post #391
bgorman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But the instruction set (ISA) absolutely matters for the entire software ecosystem!

It doesn't. Ninety-nine point five nines of software is architecture-independent, and if you're an App Store sharecropper you'll never notice. It's the users with paid-for x86 binaries who will be screwed, like they were when Apple removed the ability to run PowerPC binaries in OS X 10.7.

[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.

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

#455

Post by tuatoru »

Commenters here seem to be focused on performance while doing what x86 chips do. They're missing the point. That performance is good enough.

Top left on the arch slide: audio engine. Other on-chip blocks: camera compute, neural engine, machine learning accelerator.

This is about advancing the state of the art in personal digital assistants. The Mac change is in service of the iPhone.

I'm excited. Digital assisstants have stagnated for a long time, because of internet latency and lack of dedicated silicon (and perhaps privacy concerns). This is the way forward.

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

#456

Post by fomine3 »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #405
fomine3 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Apple can make processors for laptop and normal desktop in A-series way but I'm curious how they make for Mac Pro. Adopting architecture like chiplet?

I imagine they may use a mass amount of SOCs. Keep in mind that their Laptop game plan may be to build CPUs to the Max limits of the TDP and then use their (rather incredible) power management system to reduce power far below Intel chips for normal use. This is the iPad Game-plan, the chip is rarely ever fully hammered. You may see a 12 core Macbook Air capable of (unsustained) desktop Ryzen-level performance but it…

Using mass amount of SoCs effectively on a single machine isn't trivial. Even AMD go for simple solution on EPYC 7002.

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

#457

Post by benologist »

criddell wrote: post #406
sschueller wrote: post #298

They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone. Good luck booting anything other than macos or getting you Mac fixed anywhere other than Apple. No thanks, switching back to Linux. I'm done with this crap.

> They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone. Did they say that in the keynote?

At 1:34:04 of the presentation Fedherighi is opening up Xcode on the ARM Mac, and says, "we're using Xcode, like all our developers will" which might be construed as app store only.

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

#458

Post by zelly »

foepys wrote: post #299

People in here are so excited but I think that Apple will take this as an opportunity to make installing of custom programs even harder. The App Store might eventually be the only way to reliably install software and Homebrew could become a thing of the past.

Everyone laughed when Richard Stallman said Steve Jobs was the pioneer of the computer as a jail.

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

#459

Post by ghettoimp »

originalvichy wrote: post #291
valuearb wrote: post #32

Docker 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.

Hrmn. Wouldn't this be leaving out android and windows? It might be practical for some apps, but that's an awful lot of users.

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

#460

Post by hollandheese »

deeblering4 wrote: post #300

Hopefully MacOS support for x86 won't just be 3-5 years from whenever the new ARM models come out. I have invested quite a bit into the Mac/Apple ecosystem. A big part of that reason was the longevity of the hardware, along with good resale values. I hope they do right by their existing Mac customers. As of right now I don't have a strong reason to switch away. I also hope that Apple does not blow this transition fro…

Hopefully, but PowerPC Support was just 4 years.
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