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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

#492
post #258

Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Qu…

Re 1: I believe iCloud is hosted on Google Cloud, isn't it?

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

#493

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…

> Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. Eh? This is a flimsy claim. AMD's performance/watt is extremely impressive right now. Apple is ahead of Intel for sure, but Intel isn't the only other player here. > So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k per…

You're correct that AMD’s offerings are impressive, but that‘s vs an uncooled A12 chip. Add active cooling and a few more watts there's no reason why they couldn't blow the doors off.

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

#494

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…

> I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen IMO ARM linux is great, the real thing lacking is good hardware to run it.

Yeah, I tried out a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement and pretty much everything is supported except for proprietary stuff like games.

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

#495

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…

Apple doesn’t control their machine learning stack. The models they ship are likely created and trained on PCs running Linux and NVIDIA GPUs. It’s entirely possible they’ll extend the Neural Engine to be useful for training but they’d still need to contribute or convince others to contribute to the existing tooling.

The enduser doesn't care about training. iOS devs just care about APIs that Apple has built for them.

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

#496
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about the hardware they used for the demo.

It was stated the demo hardware is the DTK (available this week), which includes an A12Z processor from the latest iPad Pro coupled with 16 GB RAM.

Wow, that's awesome.

I was having intermittent xfiniti issues during the stream.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's was a Pro monitor, but they explicitly said that the demos actually ran on the developer transition kit powered by an A12Z...

They did have a Mac Pro there as a prop, which was interesting and potentially confusing. There was a brief moment where you could see that it was connected to something in a Mac mini case.

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

#498

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.

Electron already has support for ARM64, but no official releases yet. But it needs to be build from x86 machine. No native compilation on ARM64 yet. I think with apple moving to ARM, google will add native ARM64 compilation for chromium. This in turn will be picked by electron. Chromium has been running on ARM for a long time with Android and Chrome OS so it has all the optimizations.

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

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. Eh? This is a flimsy claim. AMD's performance/watt is extremely impressive right now. Apple is ahead of Intel for sure, but Intel isn't the only other player here. > So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k per…

AMD is tiny compared to intel, the fact that they are besting them goes to show how they have been stuck for ~5 years. The real problem though, is that apple is actually designing a core 100% focused on the target market. Unlike intel, for whatever reason, and AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops. So, I would expect the engineering tradeoffs for said laptop/desktop proces…

> AMD is tiny compared to intel, the fact that they are besting them goes to show how they have been stuck for ~5 years.

I'm having trouble following the reasoning.

> AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops.

They have plenty of funds for R&D. Problem is, processor manufacture goes much beyond the processors themselves. You have to design the entire manufacturing chain, and spend billions on new foundries which will get obsolete in a few years.

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

#500
post #426

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.

Thank you Apple for bringing the Year of the Linux Desktop

Perhaps for developers, but I think most others will move back to Windows.
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