Not quite related, but I Just wrote this comment on an Apple Pencil on iPadOS 14. Pretty sweet!
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Rust and ARM is just fine. For example, Cloudflare famously keeps their entire stack cross-compilable to ARM, and even ships Rust on iPhones. There's two areas where I believe you could call it second-class at the moment, though: 1. There is no ARM targets in Rust's "Tier 1" platform support. 2. std::arch doesn't have ARM intrinsics in stable. For 1, ARM targets are in a weird space; they aren't Tier 1, but they're c…
Sounds like this will cost Mozilla some time and money, but they will have to support it.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#803What about Windows and Linux support? Will it be locked down like iDevices, able to run only Apple's OS?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#804I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…
How do I get into the DTK program? We produce a compiler for macOS and obviously will need access to this. I looked all over developer.apple.com and didn't find anything.
You can find links at https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#805Hopefully 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…
I can't imagine how people who dropped serious cash for the 7,1 pro machines feel. I've used my 6,1 for 7 years, and I will use it until it is no longer receiving updates. So hopefully 10 years.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#806Earlier 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?
(Audio/DSP) plugins are a tricky thing, it is not uncommon for some of them to have assembly or processor specific instructions to squeeze out as much performance as possible. Your 'budget' in this domain is limited to only a few milliseconds ...
But it does a AOT recompile from x86 to ARM for extensions and plugins according to the second presentation today.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.
> I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers. Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less. Shareholders benefit from i…
> Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase.
Kool aid swallowed
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
PCIe is surprisingly robust for a high performance interface. fail0verflow mentioned doing PCIe over serial so they could mitm some of the communication when hacking the ps4.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#809Earlier 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…
> Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped Whom is Apple going to sell binned A14s to? Where does everyone think margin comes from in the chip business?
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Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#810I wonder what they can do to keep a reasonable experience for locally run dev containers intended to eventually run on x64/Linux in prod. Isn't the experience already a little subpar?