Is this CPU any different from the CPU in a Raspberry Pi? Will it be binary compatible?
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#822Commenters 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…
> Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped
Does Apple actually have its own silicon fab now or are they outsourcing manufacture? If the former, those are /expensive/ and they'll still be paying it off.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But will Apple let you run iOS apps in an environment where you can break iOS security guarantees? I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for sideloaded apps.
The Platform State of the Union presentation made a particularly big deal of “this is the Mac and the things you expect from the Mac will function as they always did”, and demonstrating things like showing the iOS app container file and moving it around.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#824Earlier 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…
Power-performance is a very nonlinear curve, so it doesn't make sense to compare single-core TDPs with all-core TDPs. The iPhone XS is 2500 MHz when one core, but drops to 2380 MHz when both primary cores are in use, a 5% performance drop... but this drop lowers power from 3.85 W to 2.12 W, 45% less!
Hence it makes much more sense to treat the A series processors as 2 watt chips when looking at multi-core scores. They're targeting efficiently hitting these lower frequencies. You'll get a similar result for the 4800HS; it'll use a lot more than 4 W single-core.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the Platforms State of the Union, they specifically listed Numpy as one of the open source projects that they built for Apple Silicon (along with Python 3 and others). Go to 20 minutes and 35 seconds on that video.
Interesting - could you share a link to the video?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#826Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.
This is why the US just struck a deal to have TSMC build a fab in Arizona. It's absolutely critical to have a backup plan.
Isnt its planned output tiny compared to the production volumes in Taiwan?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.
China can bomb TSMC, no doubt. But landing troops (they can't march, it's an island, and the difference between amphibious and land based operations matters a lot) would be extremely difficult, and not obviously in the PLA's favor. See, for example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
China's sheer scale means there aren't too many military shortcomings it can't address on a roughly 10-year timeframe.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#828Does anyone know if Apple's processors have any anti-features resembling Intel's management engine coprocessor? If there isn't any, this may be a good route to a less backdoored PC for many users--not just Apple's existing customer base :)
Pretty much every SoC has cores equivalent to the management engine. Currently they have a handful of ARM cores on the southbridge that fulfill the same purpose. I imagine that won't change. "BridgeOS" is the term to search for if you want to learn more.
The thought experiment is probably moot anyway though, as Apple probably won't allow any kernels that haven't been signed by them to be booted like on their iOS devices.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.
Could this lead to a large chip fab being built in the US? Or do they just hop to Japan / South Korea?
If we're in a scenario where Taiwan is getting bombed or invaded, South Korea and even Japan aren't exactly safe options either.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#830Anyone know what happened to Intel over the past 5+ years? They used to be unstoppable, relentless, the best. Have they had trouble recruiting the best engineers? How have TSMC and Apple been been able to pull ahead in terms of being at the lead of CPU development?
I thought maybe Intel was losing ground to TSMC for cultural reasons – being the best while being based in the US is getting harder and harder. But I'm not sure.