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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

#561

Post by ianhowson »

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…

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.

I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference.

Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.

Similarly, while ARM parts are more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it's not a dramatic change.

The big changes, I think, are more mundane:

- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped

- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they're already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?

Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that'll do 100x energy/perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.

[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you're compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you're almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting

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

#562

Post by nicoburns »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #512
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…

My suspicion is that new macOS releases will continue to support Intel-based Macs for at least three years after the last Intel-based Mac ships. New OS X releases only supported PowerPC for about two years after the last PowerPC Mac shipped, which is shorter than I'd expected, but Apple under Tim Cook has been a little less aggressive about ending support for old hardware, despite what people often seem to think. Mac…

> My suspicion is that new macOS releases will continue to support Intel-based Macs for at least three years after the last Intel-based Mac ships. New OS X releases only supported PowerPC for about two years after the last PowerPC Mac shipped, which is shorter than I'd expected

I agree with this. There's a big difference between Intel -> ARM and PPC -> Intel too: With PPC -> Intel, they were moving from their own special architecture towards the mainstream architecture that everybody else was using. In this case they're leaving an architecture that is likely to remain highly relevant outside of the Apple bubble for a long time to come.

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

#563

Post by drawkbox »

> The biggest addition this move to ARM-powered chips brings is the ability for iOS and iPad apps to run natively in macOS in the future. “Most apps will just work,” says Apple, meaning you’ll be able to run native macOS apps alongside native iOS apps side-by-side for the first time.

Pretty great for development long term.

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

#564

Post by liamness »

nicoburns wrote: post #528
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…

I'd assume that they'll still have AMD/NVidia GPUs as options if they truly plan to bring these CPUs to the Mac Pro market. There's no way that e.g. Animation studios will accept anything less than absolutely top-end performance. And upgradability too. I think Apple must know this.

Here's some mad lad adding PCIe slots to a Raspberry Pi 4:

https://twitter.com/domipheus/status/1167566293861588992

It's definitely possible, just need to expost the PCIe lanes in a sensible way (this has been rare to see on ARM-based machines so far) and have PCIe device manufacturers distribute drivers for ARM macOS.

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

#565

Post by DCKing »

I gotta say: really slick presentation.

1) Before the demo even starts: all Apple apps, pro or casual? Already running. Microsoft Office? Already running. Adobe Creative Cloud? Already running. That's the vast majority of the Mac userbase right there.

2) No apparent hard cuts on the legacy. I was expecting them to not support x86 backwards compatibility if they could get away with it, but apparently they're committed. Even naming the technologies "Universal Binaries 2" "Rosetta 2" is a confident been-there-done-that-will-do-it-again presentation. Unlike last time around, there also doesn't seem to be a major removal of macOS APIs?

3) Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away, and (trying to?) show Docker right away. Is that the first Linux demo in an Apple keynote presentation? It was a Linux desktop environment, even.

Now it seems this ARM announcement was a bit rushed by design, flashing by the features without allowing a substantial look. So it's likely we're going to be dissappointed by x86 performance and having to say good bye to APIs (this for sure is the end of OpenGL right? edit: no [1]), but they do leave an impression of having their priorities of broad software support straight and a pretty seamless transition as far as you can get one.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/porting_your...

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

#566

Post by systemvoltage »

abruzzi wrote: post #558

what makes me sad is that while Apple has done very well with these major transitions, it leaves behind instances where (for me) a completely unique application gets left in behind. I currently maintain an only system 7 computer for software that is incompatible with system 8 or 9. A MDD G4 running System 9 for software that won't run on OSX, and a Mac Pro running 10.6.8 to run PPC OSX application (through Rosetta.)…

It will be possible to virtualize old apps. For example, running OSX tiger in a VM.

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

#567

Post by Leherenn »

abvdasker wrote: post #400
ianai wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has either squandered the tech and we will see drastic improvements soon or possibly they’ll fall closer toward the dustbin of history. I suspect the later since they’ve been stuck at various points of specifications for a decade plus. Or they do something novel for once. I wouldn’t count them out of a breakthrough into new architectures/fab processes entirely.

It's astonishing to me how far Intel has fallen in so short a time. I feel like it was only a couple years ago that Intel was understood universally to be the "heavyweight champion of the world" so to speak. They completely missed the boat on mobile and AMD has leapfrogged them very recently on desktop. On top of that there were the Spectre vulnerabilities which shook confidence even further. This announcement is ano…

Not an insider, but as far as I know, it's mostly their fab that failed. They're still on 14+++nm when AMD is on 7nm, with 5nm coming soon.

You can have the best architecture in the world (no idea if they have) and the best engineers, it's hard to compete when you're so far behind in transistor size.

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

#568

Post by afwaller »

monocasa wrote: post #509
CharlesW wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logic isn't worth much without plugins… Rosetta 2 cross-compiles Intel binaries to ARM. Why would VST/AU plug-in binaries be an exception?

Will an ARM version of Logic support loading x86 plugins? Last time Rosetta was on a process by process basis, so you might have to make some unfortunate choices. Edit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou... > The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the same process. Rosetta translation applies to an entire process, including all code modules that the process loads d…

No AVX is fairly brutal

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

#569

Post by toufka »

Yhippa wrote: post #442
joakleaf wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty much the same with PowerPC to Intel... Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance. There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case. In a lot of ways, this is far mor…

Your "buts" are dead-on. Everything felt so distant and unauthentic. They should require their execs and presenters to not read from somewhere else and do it live.

There is a Pandemic going on. This fully online WWDC certainly affected the feeling as much as the content.

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

#570

Post by kllrnohj »

klelatti wrote: post #559
kllrnohj wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't agree with the characterisation here that only Apple can make decent Arm cores. Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't. Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective. However, there is a real challenge here and that's who has the capability and incentives to make laptop and desktop Arm cor…

> Graviton is apparently pretty closely based on an Arm Neoverse N1 CPU and the 64 vs 32 core point is comparing a hyperthreaded part vs one that isn't.

How does hyperthreading change the story here? The 32-core CPU is the one that had hyperthreading while the 64-core one didn't. Hypthreading is widely regarded as being around +20% performance for multithreading-friendly workloads. Either way, the per-core performance of the 32-core x86 CPU is nearly 2x that of the 64-core ARM one. That's not a good look for being desktop-viable.

Especially when the 32-core x86 cpu also comes in a 64-core variant. And then a 2P 64-core variant even. You can have double the CPU cores that are each 2x faster than the Graviton 2 CPU cores.

Which gets back to only Apple has managed to get ARM to have good per-core performance so far.

> Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.

The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.

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