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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

#571

Post by liamness »

paulpan wrote: post #407
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…

> 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…

> The other unspoken risk is that while Apple may be vertically integrating its SOC, it still relies on a fab like TSMC. Intel's recent problem is rooted in their inability to move off legacy 14nm fabrication process. TSMC may have done great in 7nm and now to 5nm transition, but what happens if/when they stumble? Would Apple also want to acquire them or build its own fabs to mitigate this risk?

Surely this is an advantage to being fabless? If TSMC stumble, they can evaluate other options. Same for AMD, where would they be now if they were still tied to GlobalFoundries?

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

#572

Post by fock »

eanzenberg wrote: post #554
jl6 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.

so could you provide some actual, open-source basic benchmarks. And not strange, opaque geekbench results...

I guess AMD is fine for me (as is my old Intel-notebook) and I'll just wait for POVray, GROMACS and Co.

EDIT: And well, I noticed, supposedly Anandtech ran SPECint2006 on the A13 (and numerous other chips) - they ran it with WSL for x86 (because running on a dozen Android things is easier than running a standard benchmark on Linux/Windows ofc). You find the results here: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-global-over... - I guess (not sure, because it's for some reason not cleary marked and mentioned...) these are SPECint2006-results. So, let's check them for validity (because WSL is no problem and it matches Linux ofc); just looking at an i7-6700K (which is a little bit behind the i9-9900K they supposedly ran on): https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2016q1/cpu2006-20160... - marginal worse performance than @anandtech in some benchmarks, but that's with an older CPU and an older arch! And then there are the 3 or 4 benchmarks which are just way off. Makes one wonder, what they really did (because of course, installing CentOS and running SPEC on native Linux is too much of a hassle, when running and compiling on 8 ARM-platforms!?)

EDITEDIT: it's even worse for SPECfp2006: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2016q1/cpu2006-20160... [well, here the old 6700K suddenly sometimes is twice as fast as the 9900K and 3x as fast as the A13 (and yeah the story of the 2.8GHz-low-power-chip drawing circles around a 4.5GHz-HF-part just didn't sound convincing in the first place...)]

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

#573

Post by satysin »

udev wrote: post #45
chvid wrote: post #26

MacMini with an A12 chip. Available now as a part of a developer kit. Will be fun to see what that can do.

I wonder what the cost of the transition mini is.

It is $500 and you have to return it at some point.

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

#574

Post by coolspot »

outworlder wrote: post #507
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. Maybe, maybe not. Where did you hear that?

That was long coming with the Mac App Store, signed apps, TPM, abandonment of OpenGL/OpenCL, etc.

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

#575

Post by nojito »

zelly wrote: post #491

It amazes me how much abuse loyal Apple customers are willing to take. How much money are you willing to spend. It's almost like this is some large-scale ritual hazing which serves to make you, the hazee, come out even more loyal on the other side.

Macs are cheaper than PCs and have longer support.

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

#576

Post by alkonaut »

eanzenberg wrote: post #554
jl6 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.

Isn't that for specific benchmarks though such as some geekbench/specint or web browsing benchmarks? I worry about non-gpu floating point for example. There is so much hand-optimized AVX/SSE code out there in big apps.

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

#577

Post by monocasa »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #527
enos_feedler wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I also thought this might be a 'dry run' for a risc-v strategy across their platforms, as risc-v was designed to be expanded for specific applications. Most of the IP is no doubt in the peripherals, which are largely CPU-instruction-set independent. We'll see. I say 5 years, tops, to first Apple risc-v device.

RISC-V doesn't really get Apple anything. They were a very very early investor in ARM back in the early 90s, and the rumor is that they have a pretty much "do whatever you want" licence to ARM technology.

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

#578

Post by jl6 »

eanzenberg wrote: post #554
jl6 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.

"As fast" on specific curated use cases. Show me an Apple chip that beats any laptop on 7zip.

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

#579

Post by Reason077 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #533
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Simply having 4 big cores on an A12 would push it into 10w actively cooled territory as well"

The A12X/A12Z already has 4 big cores (and 4 little cores, and 7-8 GPU cores). I imagine the A14X will follow this pattern, but the cores will be 2 generations newer, with 2 generations of performance-per-watt improvements.

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

#580

Post by skohan »

SXX wrote: post #489
voqv wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard from random sources that their GPUs are actually (relatively?) very powerful. Better sources/experience appreciated. "Apple claims the GPU in the iPad Pro is equivalent to an Xbox One S, although how they came to thise conclusion is difficult to say since we know so little about the underpinnings of the GPU." [1] [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad-pro...

Game console GPUs are middle-end at best. They compensate by huge amount of hardware-specific optimizations since game developer can only target few models of hardware during 5 years lifecycle and devkits for hardware become available for game engine developers almost 2 years in advance. Apple sales for Mac are much smaller numbers compared to consoles, they change generations more quickly and amount of optimization…

Still a current-gen console grade GPU in a form factor like the iPad is pretty impressive. But then again maybe it wouldn't be able to sustain console-like performance due to thermal constraints
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