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

theverge.com

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

#941

Post by kasabali »

jandrese wrote: post #177
infinityplus1 wrote: post #21

Now will Qualcomm feel a little more competition or not? There chips are slow in mobiles and they are slow in PCs, compared to Apple's processors.

Nobody gives a crap about the Qualcomm powered notebooks. They're a joke market segment. As long as Apple doesn't start selling A* chips to Samsung or other Android OEMs Qualcomm isn't going to worry.

> As long as Apple doesn't start selling A* chips to Samsung or other Android OEMs Qualcomm isn't going to worry

Even if Apple did sell their chips to other parties, Qualcomm will be still collecting its sweet patent royalty from both parties, so it couldn't care less.

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

#942

Post by deepGem »

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 - Can you elaborate a bit more on this ?

I was wondering how this would unfold and looks like things are moving in that direction https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-...

If TF models can interoperate with CoreML - boy that'll literally be a home run for Apple cos eventually all ML frameworks will follow suit.

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

#943

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ogre_codes wrote: post #726
Teknoman117 wrote: post #642

Earlier 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…

If you look at their increasing focus on services then it makes sense to pass on cost savings.

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

#944

Post by jmkni »

garrypettet wrote: post #935

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.

I'm wondering the same thing about the Jetbrains tools (Idea, Rider, PyCharm, etc)

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

#945

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

People have been making this claim for the last ten years, it hasn't happened yet.

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

#946

Post by auggierose »

old-gregg wrote: post #588
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'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…

I am pretty sure they had those TSMC conversations BEFORE the announcement.

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

#947

Post by mantap »

michelb wrote: post #908
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…

>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 th…

The Mac Pro was seen as an an assurance that Apple was going to support their Pro customers for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Mac Pro itself. It's the software and supporting hardware.

Also crucially, due to Apple's spat with NVIDIA, the Mac Pro doesn't support CUDA. This means software has to be modified to use Metal Compute to support the Mac Pro.

If you make pro software Apple just let off a huge signal that the future of the Mac Pro is at best uncertain. So maybe hold off on that Mac support for the next two years.

Apple is not going to make an ARM Xeon. The resulting computer would be so expensive after you amortise all the R&D to create a single workstation class CPU for it, that nobody would be able to afford it. All the Pros who bought Mac Pro got played hard.

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

#948

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#949

Post by nl »

deepGem wrote: post #942
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…

Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators - Can you elaborate a bit more on this ? I was wondering how this would unfold and looks like things are moving in that direction https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-... If TF models can interoperate with CoreML - boy that'll literally be a home run for Apple cos eventually all ML frameworks will follow suit.

You can convert TF models to CoreML and have been able to for quite a while: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_...

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

#950

Post by Jaruzel »

lukeholder wrote: post #864
zanethomas wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their pro/developers (influence) are too important to apple to do that.

Don't worry, they'll be able to 'unlock' the OS for an exorbitant price via an Apple Pay purchase. :)
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