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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

#681

Post by papito »

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…

Try browsing the web on a semi-decent laptop from, say, 2008. It's a frustrating experience. It is obnoxious how much CPU power modern websites require.

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

#682

Post by physicsguy »

NathanielLovin wrote: post #216
aldanor wrote: post #40

So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..

numpy/scipy/etc will have to support Accelerate instead of MKL.

SciPy did support Accelerate, but they dropped it in 2018 because Apple’s implementation of LAPACK was so out of date. Apple have been crap at updating this stuff which is why people don’t use it.

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

#683

Post by paxys »

originalvichy wrote: post #291
valuearb wrote: post #32

Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated. Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

Is there anyone building on Electron and only targeting the Mac desktop environment? Windows is still the king there.

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

#684

Post by stjohnswarts »

pier25 wrote: post #663
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…

Also heat is greatly reduced with ARM, no?

if power goes down heat will also, it's almost 1 to 1. Almost all power going into a CPU is lost as waste heat eventually.

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

#685

Post by damnyou »

valuearb wrote: post #525
msie wrote: post #381

I'm too old for this. That's great. But what's more important to me is: - Apple being hostile to developers: app approvals (Hey) - Apple hardware being hard or impossible to upgrade - MacOS turning into iOS (don't want)

Apple isn’t being hostile to Hey! They are being hostile to Apple. Imagine building a large new Paid App that you expect Apple to host and distribute for free worldwide by gaming their payment system.

Why do you think that is not a completely reasonable expectation?

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

#686

Post by Delk »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #636
Delk wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a fair point. I was referring to "most" distros in terms of the plain number of distros with reasonable mainstream visibility (and therefore possibly the majority focus from mainstream userspace developers), as a kind of a generous argument. The number of embedded Linux deployments is undoubtedly huge.

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

#687

Post by stjohnswarts »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #679
klelatti wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Sorry but there is no justification for this. With the same thermal constraints there is every expectation that an Apple / Arm CPU would be more performant and efficient than a comparable x86. Why? Because aarch64 doesn't have the historical legacy that x86 has and Apple has already s…

The comparison is a bit unfair. x86 is like a decade older than ARM. Not that much in retrospect. aarch64 is as "free of historical legacy" as x86_64 is (that is: not at all free). There is lot of cruft and even multiple ISAs in aarch64 (e.g. T32/Thumb). And the CISC vs RISC arguments are questionable, seeing that Apple has done the migration in both directions by now.

Yep, most of that old "cruft" is essentially unused and turned off. A log of critics of x86 don't really know what they're talking about. x86 is inefficient because they don't really have much incentive to end the status quo where performance is more important than power to most customers. People are happy with 3-4 hours out of their laptops so Intel and AMD aim for that and sacrifice power for performance, quit often that is the tradeoff in the design.

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

#690

Post by leonidasv »

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 chips are fast mostly because they have a lot of cache to spare.

Take for example the A12Z. It has 8MB of L2 (not L3, it's L2!) cache. An Intel Core i7-1068NG7 present in the latest Macbook Pros (that performs akin to the A12Z according to Geekbench) has only 2MB of L2 cache.

No other ARM CPU has this level of L2 cache. Apple chips are not "magical", Apple just can afford packing up lots and lots of cache because they are not in the silicon "race to the bottom" like Qualcomm and Intel are, for example. L2 cache is very expensive and Apple is just hacking its way up by packing as much L2 cache as they can.

Don't take me wrong, it's not that Apple is "right" or "wrong" by doing it. They just can and did it. However, it's needless to say that their CPUs are not so different from other ARM ones, they just happen to have a budget and a business model that let's them ignore the price/performance ratio when designing chips in order to achieve the maximum performance.

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