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

theverge.com

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

#611

Post by philjohn »

ianhowson wrote: post #534
vessenes wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget the S line of SoC's as well for the Apple Watch - which wiped the floor with the Qualcomm watch SoC.

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

#612

Post by etqwzutewzu »

ianhowson wrote: post #561
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 gain…

I'm also predicting there will be no difference in battery life.

If you check technical specifications on past MBP battery specification and battery life you can notice one thing: Watt/hour battery is always decreasing and battery life is always remaining constant (e.g., 10 hours of web scrolling).

Gain in power consumption allows to reduce component space which allows further slimmer designs.

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

#613

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

I think it will work out fine.

Apple has an absolutely top-shelf team, designing chips.

By hand (Qualifier: Not sure if they still do, but they did, while everyone else was using automation).

They also have a great deal of experience in repaving the highway while traffic is running at capacity. They mentioned it in their keynote. They've done it three times. I have been there, for each of those times.

I was also there for the one time they completely pooched it (Can anyone say "Copeland"? Drop and give me twenty!).

It will be moderately painful. Not too bad. Quite manageable, and it will take at least a couple of years to transition.

I am in no hurry for one of those dev kits, though. They will be quite rough, and I have no compelling reason to use them.

I am looking forward to an entirely new Xcode. The current one is getting crashier every day. I'd also like to have one that can run on my iPad.

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

#614

Post by Keyframe »

voqv wrote: post #445
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…

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...

Considering xbox is 1/4 the price, it's not saying much about it. On the contrary.

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

#615

Post by xenadu02 »

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.

The Mac is the Mac. Apple Silicon doesn’t change that. You can set boot args, disable security, and other things the Mac has historically supported. In fact these things are required to develop 3rd-party kernel extensions which are still supported on Apple Silicon.

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

#616

Post by sedatk »

cestith wrote: post #377
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…

That wasn't their first processor change, either. Not even was it first in the Mac line. The Apple I and II were MOS 6502 machines except for the Apple IIgs which was a 65c816. Then the early Macs were 680x0 machines. Then PowerPC. Then Intel. They looked at Intel chips for the iPhone and settled on Arm before launch. I wouldn't be surprised if some very brittle, early development version of iOS was running on an Int…

Apple is known for throwing the towel early in backwards compatibility though.

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

#617

Post by berkut »

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…

It seems (wasn't really that clear?) that Maya was running emulation? (as in, x64 binary). I don't think Maya's viewport on MacOS actually runs with Metal (it's still OpenGL), so I doubt it's a native port.

Did it do any CPU-intensive stuff (skinning, deformation), or was it just GPU-intensive viewing?

High-end VFX will be interesting for this with Apple (Maya, Houdini, Nuke) - already there was quite a lot of anger at OpenGL being deprecated and Vulcan not being officially supported. Another instruction set into the mix for highly-optimised apps (lots of SIMD code) is going to be quite annoying, especially for the CPU renderers (Arnold, Renderman, etc)...

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

#618

Post by wizee »

kllrnohj wrote: post #590
MR4D wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eh? This is a flimsy claim. Anandtech would like to disagree with your word choice. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...

Did you read your own link? > In virtually all of the SPECint2006 tests, Apple has gone and increased the peak power draw of the A13 SoC; and so in many cases we’re almost 1W above the A12. Here at peak performance it seems the power increase was greater than the performance increase, and that’s why in almost all workloads the A13 ends up as less efficient than the A12. > The total power use is quite alarming here, a…

You do realize that's 5W total, not 5W per core? Apple is currently around 4-5x the performance per watt of Intel's most efficient parts.

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

#619

Post by luhn »

lrem wrote: post #492
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…

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

Apple does use Google Cloud and AWS for some things, but is investing billions into building their own data centers.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/apple/apple-spend-10b-us...

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

#620

Post by cptskippy »

adrr wrote: post #526
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...

I don’t see how an integrated GPU can compete with the top of the line chips from nvidia and amd. The discreet GPUs(Radeon vega) in the Mac Pros have 13+ billion transistors and have 1 TB/s memory bandwidth with specialized memory.

The GPU in the Xbox One S was far from top of the line, it's pretty mediocre. A middle of the road GPU from that time frame was easily 200% faster than it.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=GCN+1.0&...

That being said, frankly I'm amazed at what most modern mobile GPUs are capable of and for most people who are casual gamers, that level of performance will be more than enough. What Apple will bring to the table will certainly be better than that, it's already better than Intel GPUs and they can still support 3rd party GPUs if necessary.

The demo they showed of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 1080p looked great for a game, AND it also looked awful if you compared it to the PC version on Ultra settings.

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