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Macintel: The End Is Nigh

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Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#81

Post by baddox »

ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

> It would be worse in almost every aspect.

I don't see any explanation in your comment of how any of those aspects would be worse.

You say "Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch" because of the volume discounts they get from Intel, but you don't cite exactly how much of a discount they get, and you still concede that Apple's own ARM chips might have a lower cost.

You say "battery life would go up a bit," and seem to imply that it could be up to 20%, which in my opinion is massive.

And you don't address size.

How then are any of those aspects worse? Even under your own seemingly pessimistic estimates, cost and battery life would improve.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#82

Post by dublinben »

School-Cotton wrote: post #28
jiggy2011 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The transition will be easy for applications that rely on Apple's APIs only, the fun will be for programs that use proprietary third party components all of which will need to be rebuilt, as well as all binary plugins to applications. I can imagine this might be a huge job for some of the more heavyweight production programs for Mac , as well as AAA games. It would basically spell doom for Parallels and other virtual…

Another negative in the same vein is that it would prevent fast emulation of Windows and many Linux/BSD distributions in something like VMWare.

Most Linux and BSD distributions are available for ARM already.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#83

Post by dzhiurgis »

higherpurpose wrote: post #63
ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

The discounts aren't that "huge" when compared to ARM chip prices. They are only "huge" in comparison to other Intel customers. But the difference still remains something close to an order of magnitude . It's been shown before that Intel chips make up roughly 40 percent of the BOM/retail price (however you want to account it) of a PC. I doubt it's less than say 30 percent for an Apple Mac. The retail price for a high…

Since when Apple cares about their bottom line?

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#84

Post by dublinben »

stuaxo wrote: post #12
eurleif wrote: post #11

I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? Will Adobe bother releasing an ARM version?

There are already ARM versions for Android, but whether they will bother making the mac version build for it is a different question.

Not any more. Flash player for Android hasn't been updated or available for more than a year.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#85

Post by ams6110 »

ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

The transition also worked because they had done it before. NEXTSTEP was already running on several CPU architectures (both big- and little-endian) including x86 before Apple even entered the picture. Undoubtedly Mac OS X is already running on ARM in Apple's labs.

I don't think boot camp/Windows virtualization is relevant. I don't know anyone who uses these features on their Macs. I'm sure there are people for whom this is a make-or-break capability, but it may be that Apple thinks that at this point, they are expendable.

Processor speed means a lot less than it used to. Even processors from half a decade ago are more than fast enough for what most people do with a computer.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#86

Post by PhantomGremlin »

rodgerd wrote: post #74
ggreer wrote: post #47

While I think the article's prediction is incorrect (see my other comment for why), it did give me an idea: Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? Their work on the Ax series has probably taught them quite a bit that could be ported over to x86-land. Also, Apple could leave out x86 cruft they don't use: legacy addressing modes, PAE, etc. And of course, they could design the CPU specifically for their products in…

> Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? There's the small matter of getting an x86 license. Which would mean buying Intel or AMD, since it's vanishingly unlikely that Intel will be handing them out any time soon.

> Which would mean buying Intel or AMD

Apple could afford to buy Intel, but antitrust considerations would probably prevent that from happening.

Apple could buy AMD, but the Intel/AMD x86 cross license probably terminates in a "change of control" situation. Which might mean a restart of the Intel/AMD lawsuits of years gone by.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#87

Post by gnaffle »

JohnBooty wrote: post #32

From the article: > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat. This is true but it ignores the primary reality of "desktop class" processor design today: RAM is the bottleneck in a really major way and most of a desktop class CPU's transistors are dedicated to overcoming this. In the ancient days,…

Agreed. I usually like JLGs commentary, but he's no expert on processor technology, and this time his analysis falls short.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#88

Post by PhantomGremlin »

eurleif wrote: post #11

I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac? Will Adobe bother releasing an ARM version?

> I wonder if this will mean the end of Flash Player for Mac?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I wish Flash on Mac would die die die. Youtube has the ability of showing me non-flash video on a Mac. And yet they often won't. The exact same video that won't play on a Mac will play just fine on an iPad. Evil bastards! With Flash dead, Google wouldn't be able to demand I use it.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#89

Post by 0x0 »

millstone wrote: post #38
overgard wrote: post #22

I'm probably in the vast minority, but I tend to use apple hardware to run windows... so I'm hoping this doesn't come to pass. I use OSX occasionally, but the thing that got me to switch to apple in the first place was bootcamp.

It's quite possible that ARM Macs will run Windows. Windows RT already runs on ARM, and Microsoft seems to be moving in the direction of embracing alternative platforms (see how they push Azure for iOS). They'd sell more Windows licenses and gain more users, and at worst they'd lose some Surface sales. Whether Apple would allow it is a different question.

I'd wager most people with a need for running windows on a mac do it to run some "legacy" win32/win64 binary application (and not just iexplore.exe or msword.exe), so an "ARM Windows Bootcamp" mode probably wouldn't solve anyone's problem.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#90

Post by throwaway90609 »

I speculate (with no inside information on this matter) that Intel has known for some time that Apple is switching to ARM. Last fall Intel shut its Waterloo site[1] which had been doing X86 LLVM work. Apple is the one big influential Intel customer using X86 LLVM, so there's only one way that makes sense.

[1] http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4152783-intel-closing-wa...

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