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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

#631

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

jl6 wrote: post #537
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…

Are you saying that Amazon AWS's Graviton 2 EC 2 servers can't handle server level performance?

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

#632

Post by wizee »

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…

The A12 draws 4W when all four big cores are maxed out. Not 4W per big core. That's 4x the performance per watt of your comparable Intel or AMD parts.

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

#633

Post by looping__lui »

jl6 wrote: post #537
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…

Yeah, last time they did that with Nvidia graphics cards just as Adobe released it’s new rendering engine everybody was really thrilled to learn they could also buy Apple video editing software that would not sht itself instead of using the Adobe tools because of that inherent Apple advantage...

E.g., a nice article from 2010: https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-wit...

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

#634

Post by 43920 »

etqwzutewzu wrote: post #612
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree battery life for casual workloads will probably stay the same. However, if CPU power consumption decreases relative to other components, battery life on heavy workloads should go up.

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

#635

Post by starsinspace »

AlbertoGP wrote: post #473

Now Apple has reached the integration that Commodore had: they made all the processors (CPU, graphics chip, sound chip, interface adapters) for their Commodore 64 and other 8-bit machines, and for the AMIGA. I’m worried it will bring even more close control by them of what we run and how we run it on those computers, but having lots of custom chips (many of them in one package) for all kinds of things with a unified…

Nitpick: for the Amigas they used Motorola 68000 series CPUs.

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

#636

Post by Gibbon1 »

Delk wrote: post #622
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’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen In terms of distros maybe yes. Most distros are targeted at laptops, desktops or servers, and few of those have ARM processors. In terms of architectural support by the kernel and low-level infra, I see no reason for that to be true at all. Open source kernels and (at least lower-level) userspace have for de…

> Most distros are targeted at laptops, desktops or servers, and few of those have ARM processors.

I wouldn't bet my farm on that without a bunch of research and cross checking because embedded linux is really common. Consider manufacturers are producing very large numbers of embedded ARM micro's with external memory interfaces. I think the majority of those are running linux.

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

#637

Post by toyg »

baddox wrote: post #625
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Don’t iPads get significantly better battery life than similar casual workloads on a similar form factor Intel PC (like a MacBook Air)?

That’s mostly because desktop systems are built with more background services and traditional multitasking in mind. iOS has a different set of principles.

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

#638

Post by Teknoman117 »

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…

Why do feel that Rust is behind on ARM? I can't comment on the performance, but everything that I used that was purely written in Rust compiled and ran perfectly on my PineBook Pro. (with the exception of alacritty, but that's because PBP doesn't support OpenGL 3.x)

Go does have the (platform) advantage (?) of preferring the "rewrite everything in Go" approach, so those just transition when the tooling supports a new architecture. Rust is intentionally going with a interop design, rather than telling people the only answer to to rewrite all their favorite libraries.

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

#640

Post by baddox »

toyg wrote: post #637
baddox wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t iPads get significantly better battery life than similar casual workloads on a similar form factor Intel PC (like a MacBook Air)?

That’s mostly because desktop systems are built with more background services and traditional multitasking in mind. iOS has a different set of principles.

But luckily for Apple the control the OS as well.
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