As long as it's still x86/AMD64 we're good. I really don't want to see PPC/Intel fragmentation again.
Apple does not have an x86 license.
Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
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Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#12I 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 the…
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Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#13There's always a hedge afoot. Apple had OS 7 running on Intel as early as 1992.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#14I 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 the…
The Playstation 4 does this as the south bridge is really just an ARM chip. So I think you are right.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#15There 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.
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Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#16I 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 the…
Doesn't that complicate the mainboard design vastly? Memory & caching, clocks & time, concurrency, etc.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#17There's always a hedge afoot. Apple had OS 7 running on Intel as early as 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
NeXT had an Intel version as a hedge as well. Seems those two projects were destined to merge together.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#18There 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.
> 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.
And if the company wasn't floating the idea of switching. Should at least give them leverage in negotiations with Intel.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Remember the time when software X on wintel ran circles around software X on macos/ppc and people pretended it was not the case?
Guess we are going to see more of that soon.
Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
#20As long as it's still x86/AMD64 we're good. I really don't want to see PPC/Intel fragmentation again.
Licensing x86/AMD64 requires licenses from both Intel and AMD, which probably would be quite expensive, even if they can threaten to go ARM otherwise, and engineers with the low-level experience probably are way harder to find than for ARM (where quite a few companies hold various levels of licensing, and Apple likely already has quite a lot of talent inhouse)