Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 1001 posts

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

#931

Post by imtringued »

papito wrote: post #681
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…

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.

Honestly, back when my PSU died I just did that. Beyond the lack of video decoding support for modern codecs it was perfectly acceptable as a backup machine.

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

#932

Post by imtringued »

zanethomas wrote: post #857
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 predicting a future where the os is completely locked down and all software for macs be purchased from the app store. Great revenue model for Apple.

That's basically what Microsoft did with ARM on Windows and I'm sure Apple will take advantage of this opportunity.

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

#933

Post by nona »

1_player wrote: post #539
zelly wrote: post #374

The question is will I be able to install Debian on it? Is the bootloader going to be locked like iPhones? Is the ISA going to be different from Aarch64 on commodity ARM boards? Will the only supported compiler be Apple LLVM?

Running Linux is already not very straight forward on modern x86 Apple hardware, it would be extremely surprised to see the ARM Apple running Linux anytime soon. It'll happen, eventually, when the open source community will reverse engineer them and find how to "jailbreak" them.

Then we still have to deal with drivers; I don't see mesa supporting the A12 GPU anytime soon, for instance. I think this is the end of the line for Linux on Macs.

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

#934

Post by imtringued »

bluedino wrote: post #851
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…

CPU’s do not mostly run idle, if my CPU usage indicator is accurate.

I was going to follow up with an anecdote about how my computer has used less than 15 minutes of CPU time in the last 2 hours but then again I forgot to stop a docker container that automatically ran an ffmpeg command in the background consuming 70 min of CPU time.

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

#935

Post by garrypettet »

I wonder what impact this will have for developers using non-Apple development tools. For example, I'm a C# .NET Core developer using Visual Studio. I'm hoping that the architecture shift won't be too disruptive to people who choose to use development environments other than Apple's Xcode.

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

#936

Post by bnastic »

DrJokepu wrote: post #725
tgv wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.

Professional users of Logic (but also Pro Tools) tend to be very conservative with their upgrades. People who use Logic for a living won’t be using this for years to come.

This is absolutely true. Many are still running on old-old Mac Pros with Snow Leopard. Upgrades are done when hardware can't keep up anymore, but they also tend to use big DSP rigs from Avid and UA that remove the CPU bottleneck for major tasks.

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

#937

Post by secondcoming »

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…

I'm not sure virtualising ARM on Intel platforms will ever be performant enough to be usable. They will probably have to ship an emulator, and even then there will be issues as it'll be very difficult to emulate the strictness of ARM CPUs on non-ARM architectures, for things like unaligned memory accesses and replicating the memory model.

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

#938

Post by imtringued »

fiblye wrote: post #897
jl6 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an analogy to help explain the skepticism: ants have amazing efficiency - they can lift multiples of their own body weight. So why can't an ant lift my car? Well, because it's too small. So let's just take the same ant design and scale it up? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A creature capable of lifting my car wouldn't be much like an ant. There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become…

Your wording makes it sound like ARM is still being used just for smaller devices and controllers with very well defined and limited uses. General purpose computing is already possible with iPads and iPhones. They're just artificially limited by the OS. iDevices weren't really made with games in mind, but they can push out performance that beats handheld gaming devices. Artists (including myself) use iPads extensivel…

The OS is the curated use case. Multitasking is an afterthought. Once the OS is no longer "holding them back" the Apple chip will run into similar problems that Intel CPUs run into.

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

#939

Post by thirdsun »

tgv wrote: post #439
ksec wrote: 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…

> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.

> Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM

I don't think they can afford not to - mac users make up a signifcant share of their target audience.

Furthermore there's always the emulation option although it remains to be seen how performant that would be in an such a demanding, time-critical application like AU/VST instrument and effects.

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

#940

Post by dindresto »

berkut wrote: post #617
ksec wrote: 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…

It seems (wasn't really that clear?) that Maya was running emulation? (as in, x64 binary). I don't think Maya's viewport on MacOS actually runs with Metal (it's still OpenGL), so I doubt it's a native port. Did it do any CPU-intensive stuff (skinning, deformation), or was it just GPU-intensive viewing? High-end VFX will be interesting for this with Apple (Maya, Houdini, Nuke) - already there was quite a lot of anger…

As Apple's own GPUs do not run full OpenGL, does this in turn mean they didn't only create a x86 to ARM translation layer but also a full OpenGL implementation running on top of Metal? Similar to other projects implementing OpenGL on top of Vulkan? Or did they actually invest the time to implement OpenGL directly in their graphics drivers?

That seems a bit weird considering OpenGL has been deprecated in macOS already. I would have expected a full removal once the first ARM Macs ship.

Post reply on HN