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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

#901
post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace Apple with Google or Microsoft and it would get shit on around here. Apple gets a pass

Apple's market share is still low enough for this to be a relative non-issue.

Apple's marketcap however ($1.5 trillion) has me worried.

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

#903

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…

Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators Thank you for mentioning this. I feel like many have missed it. I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage. Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel. Where Apple can re…

I know a couple people trying to port an ML app to iOS. It sounds like the interfaces are a bit of a nightmare, and the support for realllly basic stuff in the audio domain is lacking.

I don't know the dev ecosystem for apple broadly, but this doesn't bode well for people "bothering to exploit" the hardware.

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

#904

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 has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.

One word, Catalina.

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

#905
post #900

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 am predicting the opposite. Apple isn't about the extend its Mac for Performance or Battery sake. They are going about expanding its marketshare. There are close to 1 Billion iPhone users, most of them have never used a Mac. We will need a 2nd Devices for some of those task. And that will either be a iPad or Mac. Out of the 1.5B total PC Market, Apple has 100M Mac users. I will say it is not too far fetched to say…

> For every $100 dollar going to Intel, Apple could knock $200 off its Retail price while getting the same margin.

They're not going to change their retail price. It'll be the same, but "better"/"different" ... that's how they'll market it.

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

#906
post #100

Good time for anyone who was using macOS for gaming or anything else for that matter to switch to Linux. OpenGL bit rot, refusal to support Vulkan, dropping of 32-bit, dropping of x86_64 architecture - all that should have been a hint. Backwards compatibility is not even an option there (besides for emulation).

I started using MacBooks when they switched to Intel around 2008. Maybe this is a sign to move on. Currently using a mid 2014 model, I like the slim form factor, but I don't like the absence of an ethernet port. I don't care much for the retina display, my 2008 matte model was better. Been looking at the Lenovo T470. I need something that would be easy to replace quickly anywhere in the world. What should I get?

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

#907
post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. > Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is > roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from > any other manufacturer. We haven't been able to compare them. Micro-benchmarks do not count because mobile versions of Apple chips haven't been designed for desktop requirements. People love comparing CPU cores with micro-benchmarks, but the hardest thing for a modern desktop/server chip is to feed…

> Look, AMD is not stupid, and they're on the same node Apple will be using Could you elaborate? What do you mean with the "same node"?

[deleted]

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

#908
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…

>I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel.

Not much. If you bought that machine you didn't care about it much as you bought older hardware at a premium price-point. You bought it to use it right now without fussing and have accepted it's obsolescence in 2-4 years, as is quite normal for studios.

If you bought it as an IT enthousiast, well..why would you even do that?

I don't see Apple coming out with an ARM Mac Pro within 3 years anyway. Why would they do that? No upside for them, that market has to be won back first. Slowly start with laptops and iMac, focusing on consumers, get the OS in shape and third-party vendors accustomed to the platform first.

iPad-like performance is already fast enough for almost all consumers, and I'm sure Apple doesn't want to break with Intel on everything right away.

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

#909

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…

> Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.

Umm what? Rust supports ARM as a first class citizen as does LLVM. They only list ARM as second class because it's not a desktop platform generally. https://forge.rust-lang.org/release/platform-support.html

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

#910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anything that runs Firefox also supports Rust as Rust is a core part of Firefox.
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