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Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#2
There is only one piece of "news" (possibly speculation) in this article: that they may offload some processing to the ARM coprocessor as a transitional step. Interesting idea!

But the idea that they have the Mac OS running on their own ARM chips -- Apple shareholders should be annoyed if the company weren't doing this.

OS X was running for a long time on Intel before anyone decided to make Intel based Macs.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#6

As long as it's still x86/AMD64 we're good. I really don't want to see PPC/Intel fragmentation again.

I thought it was mostly painless. Vast majority of applications provided an Intel binary right away without many issues. Rosetta wasn't too terrible for simple tasks for the rest of them.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#7
>Is it IBM compatible though?

Man, I hated hearing that question. It was so utterly retarded, but trying to explain to the person who asked why it was a retarded thing to say always came off as damage control.

>Yep, not IBM compatible. Not interested.

Maybe Apple can get away with their own chips now. It sounds like they just want to take more R&D away from Mac though. "Just stick an A10 in it."

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#8

As long as it's still x86/AMD64 we're good. I really don't want to see PPC/Intel fragmentation again.

Probably arm this time around and if you look at the linux ecosystem you'll see that there's nothing to fear.

What?

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#9
I think that in the long run you'll see a hybrid ARM/x64 Mac sharing the same case in the same way we have hybrid graphics.

If you look at most of the processes running on a Mac, how many of those need to be running on the power-hungrier Intel chip? You could easily offload much of the kernel, Dock, compositor, Twitter desktop, etc to a lower-power ARM. In the case where you aren't running any x64 apps, you could then power that chip down and run solely on ARM.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#10
post #6

As long as it's still x86/AMD64 we're good. I really don't want to see PPC/Intel fragmentation again.

I thought it was mostly painless. Vast majority of applications provided an Intel binary right away without many issues. Rosetta wasn't too terrible for simple tasks for the rest of them.

It wasn't that great for Adobe product users.
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