Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs • Hacker News Board

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

#911

Post by manmal » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

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.

My new 16“ MBP is good for 2-2.5h max when used for working on big projects in Xcode. I expect to almost double that with the new CPUs. The people who have exactly this problem are also those who buy the most expensive hardware from Apple.

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

#912

Post by dannyw » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:03 AM UTC

thewileyone wrote: post #905

ksec wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect it'll allow them to put OLEDs on the Macs.

That would be a GIGANTIC unique differentiator for the Macs. Once you see it, you won't be able to tolerate a non-OLED display. ever again.

I'm just thinking about my development environment background, Terminal, etc in pure black and off... Wow.

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

#913

Post by willtim » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:06 AM UTC

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…

You've missed off possibly the biggest advantage of ditching Intel. A perfectly usable machine without jet engine fans and a scolded lap. I don't use Mac's, but I see this as good for the industry.

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

#914

Post by apexalpha » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:18 AM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #565

I gotta say: really slick presentation. 1) Before the demo even starts: all Apple apps, pro or casual? Already running. Microsoft Office? Already running. Adobe Creative Cloud? Already running. That's the vast majority of the Mac userbase right there. 2) No apparent hard cuts on the legacy. I was expecting them to not support x86 backwards compatibility if they could get away with it, but apparently they're committed…

>Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away

I do believe they showed a Linux ARM VM. And not a x86 VM.

x86 VM's are probably going to take a massive QEMU performance tax. The positive news it the boost for the Linux ARM space, which will see a massive boost.

Games on Mac? Games on Mac with Windows Bootcamp? Yeah... Maybe buy a console or a second PC...

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

#915

Post by querez » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:20 AM UTC

anoncow wrote: post #887

JohnBooty wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This could mean the following things. 1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones. 2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently. 3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here,…

> 1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.

What makes Android phones less attractive, in your opinion?

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

#916

Post by arrrg » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #102

I'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…

They had to announce this early to allow developers to get ready. If they could have gotten away with not announcing early they would have. Obviously (if all apps would automatically run natively on ARM without any developer involvement) they would have first announced this with an actual new Mac.

That, however, was not an option. So they have to tread carefully in what they say and they also have to be a bit careful about showing off too much.

They only had to tout the benefits of ARM insofar as to placate the fears of consumers (their Rosetta story plus virtualization story helped there) and to provide some reasonable justification to actually make devs at least a bit excited, even though they have to do additional work.

Plus: No ARM Mac (except the transition kit) currently exists. It’s not even clear if the first Mac they will announce is even finished yet, if only internally. And even if it is finished: Do you think going on stage now and talking about a new MacBook Air that has twice the performance and 50% more battery life as the current MacBook Air – oh, and you can get one in December – would be a good idea?

This is Apple’s tightrope walk to avoid too much of an Osborne effect. I think they are ok with some Osborne effect (if only because they know that even if no one buys an Intel Mac ever again during the next two years transition time they will not go bankrupt, so far from it) but you don’t have to provoke one, right?

I expect plenty of numbers and comparisons when they introduce the actual first ARM Mac.

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

#917

Post by looping__lui » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #727

looping__lui wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Apple’s own pro apps will be updated to support the company’s new silicon in macOS Big Sur, and the company is hoping developers will update their apps. “The vast majority of developers can get their apps up and running in a matter of days,” claims Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. []... Microsoft is working on Office updates for the new Mac silicon, and Word and Excel are alrea…

> So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash” Did you miss the part where there’s going to be a “Rosetta 2” AOT/JIT translation layer?

You are aware that you will (most likely) lose all those pretty amazing optimisations that you tend to rely on if you develop software that is a bit more “sophisticated” (e.g., parallel programming leveraging IPP etc.). Can’t wait to see how fast that translation layer will be for my FFTs that have been super optimised for Intel chips.

I wonder: when I observed 20+% performance loss for high compute intensive scientific tasks Intel vs. AMD because I relied on IPP - how much performance loss will we see for the x86 to Arm?

For your average Text application you may not care about performance loss. But I bet you, that for video, image editing, science etc. you are easily 20+% worse off than before.

So what exactly is the benefit for the customer or the developer community?

So I can play Angry birds on my Mac?

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

#918

Post by DCKing » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #914

DCKing wrote: post #565

I gotta say: really slick presentation. 1) Before the demo even starts: all Apple apps, pro or casual? Already running. Microsoft Office? Already running. Adobe Creative Cloud? Already running. That's the vast majority of the Mac userbase right there. 2) No apparent hard cuts on the legacy. I was expecting them to not support x86 backwards compatibility if they could get away with it, but apparently they're committed…

>Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away I do believe they showed a Linux ARM VM. And not a x86 VM. x86 VM's are probably going to take a massive QEMU performance tax. The positive news it the boost for the Linux ARM space, which will see a massive boost. Games on Mac? Games on Mac with Windows Bootcamp? Yeah... Maybe buy a console or a second PC...

Your comment made me rewatch that section of the Keynote [1], and I believe you're right. Docker and Parallels were shown in a 'virtualization' subsection, and not the Rosetta subsection. So that must have been ARM64 Debian we saw there indeed. Did I say that their presentation was too fast :) ?

That's going to be interesting in the end. Being able to build/smoke test x86 containers on macOS will be important, at least for a while. So it's up in the air whether that will be addressed, although it's worth noting that Docker already supports cross building images [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD3J89ZE&t=5918

[2]: https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/

Another interesting note is that the user agent in their Apache logs still says "Intel Mac OS X". Wonder if they'll keep that.

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

#919

Post by Someone » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

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…

“Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators“

I think that hits the nail on the head. Since I only cursory listened to both the keynote and the state of the union I may have missed it, but I heard them neither mention “CPU” nor “ARM”. The term they use is “Apple Silicon”, for the whole package.

I think they are, at the core, but from what they said, these things need not even be ARM CPUs.

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

#920

Post by AsyncAwait » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:58 AM UTC

anoncow wrote: post #887

JohnBooty wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This could mean the following things. 1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones. 2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently. 3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here,…

I do hope AMD does well here as Apple's chips with all their custom silicon, T3 etc, mean the death of booting anything but apple signed OS images on that, forget Linux.

And that's not the future I am willing to buy into.