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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

#531

Post by mortenjorck »

m12k wrote: post #395
wtallis wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time around, the dev kits had Pentium 4 processors but the Intel Macs that launched used Core and Core 2 processors— a totally different microarchitecture with drastically different performance and power characteristics. It's a pretty safe bet that the first ARM Macs will be using SoCs that are at least a generational improvement over the A12Z. The higher-power Macs that will probably be released toward the end…

I'm honestly pretty excited to see what Apple can deliver. The A12Z is passively cooled, yet is on par with the 10th gen i5 in the new 13 inch MBP: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-13-inch-mid-2... Just imagine what they can do with active cooling!

> The A12Z is passively cooled

While it's certainly possible the A12Z in the Developer Transition Kit is a true drop-in from the iPad, I would be surprised if it's not clocked significantly higher and actively cooled given the relaxed power and thermal restrictions.

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

#532

Post by zaroth »

notSupplied wrote: post #504
paulpan wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity. I think GPU scaling will be much harder than CPU, so whereas Apple can surpass Intel CPUs for all but the highest segments, putting together a standalone GPU will be hard and very interesting to see. For an entry-level GPU? No issues. But what about a…

And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.

Could this lead to a large chip fab being built in the US? Or do they just hop to Japan / South Korea?

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

#533

Post by kllrnohj »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #493
kllrnohj wrote: post #325

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…

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.

I think you're either underestimating how much power an A12 consumes or overestimating what actively cooled CPUs consume per-core.

The A12 will pull around 4w on a single-core workload to come close to 9900K in performance. That's a good number, but it's not unheard of. The 4800HS is also a 4w per core CPU, and also comes close to the 9900K in performance.

The problem is increasing single-core performance becomes non-linear. It's not just a few more watts to bump from 3ghz to 4ghz. It's a lot of watts.

Simply having 4 big cores on an A12 would push it into 10w actively cooled territory as well, same as the i5 in a macbook air (a CPU that's also 10w). Add a few watts to bump the single core performance while you're at it and suddenly it's a 20w chip. Make it 8-cores to compete with the current macbook pro CPUs and suddenly it's a 40w chip.

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

#534

Post by ianhowson »

vessenes wrote: post #343
ksec wrote: 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…

Inferring from the video announce plus guessing: Will they have a wide TDP range of designs? Yes. On feasibility, there are two major components to the cost - first is the engineering cost for design. You can bet that these costs are not massive; Apple has roughly $200 billion cash on hand right now. Most of the work will be scaled up as part of their overall design process. The second cost component is the Non-recur…

> wide TDP range of designs

Keep in mind that this doesn't imply a different chip design. TDP is primarily a function of intended application and cooling capacity, not chip tech.

That said, they've already demonstrated ability to do this with A12/A12X/A12Z, which are the same chip at different CPU/GPU core counts. Clock rates are not impacted except where thermal limitations (TDP) impose a limit.

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

#535

Post by zaroth »

xigency wrote: post #522
notSupplied wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.

TSMC has fabs in mainland China as well. China is a friend of capitalism.

According to Wikipedia, TSMC's 9th largest fab is based in China. Their 1st - 8th largest fabs are based in Taiwan.

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

#536

Post by valuearb »

amelius wrote: post #415

As they are a relatively new player, I wonder: how many patents of Intel/AMD/Nvidia will they infringe on?

How bout zero since they aren’t doing anything they haven’t done before three times over in the last twenty years? Didn’t you catch their use of Rosetta2 and UniversalBinary2 to differentiate them from previous versions written in prior decades?

They aren’t even running any Intel instructions.

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

#537

Post by jl6 »

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…

Here's an analogy to help explain the skepticism: ants have amazing efficiency - they can lift multiples of their own body weight. So why can't an ant lift my car? Well, because it's too small. So let's just take the same ant design and scale it up? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A creature capable of lifting my car wouldn't be much like an ant.

There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become 4x faster by 4x'ing the power/TDP/die area. If it were that easy, Intel would already have done it (and no, the x86 architecture isn't so terribly inefficient that they are leaving triple-digit percentage improvements on the table).

What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Apple will extract an advantage by putting custom hardware acceleration into them, to cater for those specific tasks. They will not be able to achieve general purpose performance improvements wildly beyond what Intel can already do.

This is how the current iDevices achieve their excellent performance and battery life. Not through raw general-purpose CPU horsepower, but by a finely tuned synergy between hardware and software. Apple are taking their desktop down the same route. This will be the ultimate competitive advantage for their own software - they will be able to move key software components into hardware, and make it look like magic. But as a developer, you won't be able to participate in this unless you target Apple-blessed hardware instructions/APIs. Your Python script isn't going to start running 4x faster unless you can convince Apple to implement its inner loop in custom silicon.

I have no doubt that Apple will be leaning hard into ASIC territory as they build out their new CPUs. The endgame? Every software function you need, baked into perfectly optimised silicon by the monovendor.

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

#538

Post by valuearb »

amelius wrote: post #484
tuatoru wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could just buy them all.

You can't always buy patents. If other players don't want Apple in the CPU market, they could just block Apple. Patents offer a monopoly on a technology after all. A different scenario would be if Apple built a war chest of CPU-related patents, which they could use for trading.

Apple isn’t using any instructions from their CPUs

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

#539

Post by 1_player »

zelly wrote: post #374

The question is will I be able to install Debian on it? Is the bootloader going to be locked like iPhones? Is the ISA going to be different from Aarch64 on commodity ARM boards? Will the only supported compiler be Apple LLVM?

Running Linux is already not very straight forward on modern x86 Apple hardware, it would be extremely surprised to see the ARM Apple running Linux anytime soon.

It'll happen, eventually, when the open source community will reverse engineer them and find how to "jailbreak" them.

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

#540

Post by zitterbewegung »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #466
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…

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.

You can do some refinement right now already (from WWDC 2019).

But yes, most models are trained on NVIDIA GPUs that are deep learning. All of the other model types can already be trained on regular CPUs.

https://machinethink.net/blog/coreml-training-part1/

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