You're making the incorrect assumption that apple would in fact emulate. As they control the whole stack, they can (relatively) quickly switch architectures. They'd lose the market that does in fact install windows on mac hardware, though that is likely a negligible niche. So for the vast majority of their customers there would not be a performance penalty. Quite the opposite. Apple chips are in terms of tech already…
No. You also lose compatibility with every game and most major applications like Adobe, since all of these use lots of highly optimized, handwritten assembler code for critical sections, as well of all code paths using x86 vector instructions or other hw acceleration. Thanks but no thanks.
Those vendors will follow. As they have previously when they transitioned from powerpc to x86. Games is a good point. But this is not a big thing on MacOS (as yet) anyways. If it saves hundreds of dollars per machine, its a no-brainer for the vast majority of users.
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…
You're forgetting about there being no fan.
No fan noise, no fan volume, no openings for dust to get inside the system. I personally can't wait until laptop fans go away.
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…
You're forgetting about there being no fan. No fan noise, no fan volume, no openings for dust to get inside the system. I personally can't wait until laptop fans go away.
ARM doesn't mean "no fan". I can't wait for laptop fans to go away but currently the only fanless laptops you can buy are atom based and all of them outperform their ARM equivalents.
When you start getting into "laptop level" power (ie comparable to pentium), even at the ARM level, you start seeing fans. For example, the first generation nvidia shield.
I'm saddened that nobody ever brings up video games when talking about these architectural shifts. Practically all PC games in the past few decades have been written for x86, and most of them will never be patched for ARM compatibility. These games are as important to many of us as movies or music, and yet I fear they're destined to disappear from our cultural memory if this shift ever happens. Virtualization just wo…
> I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture.
Opening the source would help quite a lot with that.
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.
Activate Developer Tools in the preferences of Safari. This gives you a Developer menu in the toolbar. When a site refuses to play video on your Mac because it needs Flash, you tell Safari to pretend it's an iPad. The site invariably serves you the video you wanted, without Flash.
this is about the most poorly written article i've ever read! well, second that to some of the trash on techcrunch. how about some benchmarks of compiling code on intel vs arm instead of saying that since ipads (arm based) cost more than macbook airs (intel), so therefore intel will fade from apple's line of laptop/desktops. i think arm processor laptops are going to become mainstream, but not for most of the arguments specified in the article. i believe this fate is still far away as x86 still offers total raw compute power over arm, even though arms are more energy efficient.
also, the self noted digressions in the article arent even funny, feels like someone with an english degree and subscription to "i can spell x86" magazine wrote this article
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,…
Problem here is that you are mixing memory latency and memory bandwidth together. We have memory that can easily sustain 16 simultaneous cores in bandwidth (and honestly, memory bandwidth potential is mostly untapped - you only see higher bandwidth benefits for integrated GPUs because they have many more execution units demanding more data). Meanwhile, the latency has been getting worse. The refresh rates increasing…
1. Memory isn't just slow because they went for capacity not performance (except vacuously), it's slow because of the laws of physics. c.f. L3 memory is made of the same stuff as registers but takes about 30 times longer to access.
2. No, adding lots of dumb cores makes no sense.
3. GPUs are useful because many tasks are embarrassingly parallel. Many more are not.
4. 'If we wrote better software' adding many more cores increases the difficulty of reasoning about software hugely. Many tasks are not easily performed in parallel, or the speedup is not impressive enough. Most operating systems (my guess is that OS X is included) will choke if you give them too many threads - performance drops hugely, or many threads are left totally idle. This is due to lock contention etc.
5. Of course no-one 'needs' that Haswell logic - but it's sure nice having my computer do stuff quickly. My top-of-line phone struggles to play through its animations properly, and loading websites frequently takes a while. Good-enough is not really a good place to be. Furthermore, greater performance motivates more demanding applications.
6. We dedicate everything to offsetting slow memory because it's the only way to get good performance from the majority of tasks. Sure if your task can be handled by a GPU, by all means run it on a GPU. For those that cannot, we have a CPU.
There's a reason why the iPhone and iPad only have two cores - it's not worth their while adding more but does add lots of cost and complexity.