181–190 of 263 posts
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> why not, for example allow iOS apps to run in macOS Never say never, but that is the sort of thing Apple would never do.
I believe the Touch Bar on new MacBook Pros is a modularized component running a version of iOS on ARM.
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Rosetta was mostly painless because the raw performance of the Intel chips were multiples of the G4 chips in the macs (especially considering most systems doubled the available core count). Even so Creative Suite was slower as high performance plugins used altivec which was not emulated. This wasn't an issue for compatibility as the G3's never had it, so almost every app had non altivec code paths. The overhead was m…
Performance per watt is pretty good on ARM. Most performance these days is about IO. How fast is the memory subsystem? There are intel chips with 400 gigs per second memory subsystems. But the cores run at around 1.4ghz. Even a single thread with that much memory bandwidth can be much faster. Likewise with cache. If you have 32MB of cache, you can do quite a lot more processing in cache, and be lots faster for many t…
It makes sense to simply make vendors rebuild the app for the new platform then to use an emulating layer.
An emulator may be used for legacy apps, where performance doesn't matter, but apple has never worried too much about legacy in the past, so the mac community won't expect it. All the laptop needs to have is some other killer feature and the community will put enough pressure on the vendors to produce an OSX/arm build of their products.
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 the…
This sounds incredibly kludgey and at odds with Apple's de-investment in macOS. (As in "reduced investment", not "divestment".) Adding massive complexity to eke out another hour or two of battery life seems like a poor choice when there are so many things to be fixed in the OS.
Can you just imagine how long the battery would last on an arm based macbook? Days?!
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> [...] to dig out a marginal product that nobody buys anyway I wonder if they could expand the Pro desktop to be for serious gamers as well as dev's, videographers, animators etc. It'd be interesting to see what Razor and Alienware make on their systems - could it be enough to justify a presence in the high-end desktop market? As for bringing gamers to the platform, Apple already has experience with this...from the…
> It would come down to whether there's money to be made in the area, and I suspect most serious gamers build their own systems. Spot on. The ultra-performance professionals and the big-spending gamers often do their own builds and then keep upgrading them. Apple has always seen itself more of a sealed-box consumer appliance supplier, basically de-skilling computing.
I think this claim stands in pretty stark contrast to the history of Apple products in the professional graphic/video sector.
Even for people doing stuff like CAD that is less sensitive to image quality and more performance-oriented - nobody at a company of any real size (say >25 users) assembles their own hardware. I'm sitting two feet from an HP Z400 workstation that my (architect) father-in-law snagged for me when his company upgraded their CAD workstations.
The reality is that assembling PCs, debugging them when hardware breaks, etc is not free. Once you approach a certain scale (I would imagine this is roughly around the point of a single tech) it starts becoming worthwhile to externalize the cost instead of hiding it in salaries. For a price, Dell or HP will make sure that you don't have to worry about your hardware. If you hire a bunch of new people, a bunch of new boxes will show up tomorrow. If you have a PC crap out, they'll get it back up tomorrow.
Of course they do charge for this, and they make a profit doing it (i.e. they charge more than it actually costs). Once you are at a really huge scale, it might be worthwhile to bring it back in-house and have someone do it full-time. But like any managed service, it's a viable proposition at certain scales. You buy Amazon AWS instead of running your own servers, a lot of businesses buy HP or Dell workstations instead of worrying about it themselves.
Power-gamers are pretty much always individuals, who (like tiny startups) are price-sensitive and build their own hardware. When you don't have an income stream tied to the product, it's worth spending an evening building it yourself. Although this still assumes a power-gamer with some decent knowledge of hardware. First-time builders have a bit of a hump to get over, and beige boxes sold for family PCs drastically outnumber the power-gamers.
Still though, to the more general point, Apple still has some pretty serious mind-share in the professional market, although it fades year over year especially when they're pushing shit like the trash-can Mac. I think it's premature to say that Apple can never succeed in the professional market, especially given their historic inroads in that market.
But again, they do themselves no favors by not upgrading their hardware. The current base model Mac Pro GPU uses the workstation version of the Radeon HD 7870. The high-end model uses the workstation version of the Radeon HD 7970. That's pretty ancient in tech terms, especially now that NVIDIA is moving away from Kepler. It's three generations old, they should have moved on to Fiji-based chips a year ago.
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The Playstation 4 does this as the south bridge is really just an ARM chip. So I think you are right.
And the PS3 before it. And the WiiU, and the Wii. And every AMD chip since about 2013 (AMD Platform Security Processor, their equivalent of Intel's ME). Honestly, pretty much every complex electronic device (and quite a few not so!) out there has a bunch of ARMs inside of it doing system management. This is borderline a non-story IMO. Hell, an ARM7TDMI was a pretty common core to use on SD cards a few years back. The…
It's finally happening! The increase in competition in both the foundry and architectural spaces is exactly what we need to push us past this stagnation of Moore's Law. Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture. There are huge parts of their processor designs that no one at the company modifies (or even understands) from one generation to the next, but which they cannot remove for backward…
Why can't they keep doing x86 stuff and start something else at the same time?
It's taken roughly 40 years to get x86 to its current position, and almost as long to get ARM to its current position. For how many years would you have to invest in a new architecture (ie lose money) before you could compete with them?
AMD has just done a new chip design (Zen) but it's x86-compatible because that's where the software is....
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Yes, but this is not specifically what I'm talking about. Think of something like MS Outlook - it's a big, complex app with lots of features. Now imagine that you only write the app once, but design two interfaces for it - one set for the Mac, and the other for the iPad. You compile through XCode, and upload to the App store. Apple notes that their are interfaces for both iPad and Mac, and posts it in both app stores…
One basic problem - macOS has many, many more features than iOS. There would be a lot more involved than redesigning the UI. The two platforms have fundamentally different class trees all the way from the view and user event classes down to core OS hooks. There's some limited overlap, but not as much as you might expect. Merging the two platforms and creating a UI-level split wouldn't be impossible, but it would be a…
Do you mean the Windows Runtime subsystem? How is it a disaster?
Can you just imagine how long the battery would last on an arm based macbook? Days?!
look at iPhone 6 for clues - Apple replaced 0.1 mm thick piece of metal rf shield with a sticker to make it thinner, that removed metal can was reinforcing pcb and all the bga chips, without it iPhone 6/6+ bends, cracks balls under important ICs and develops touch disease.
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This sounds incredibly kludgey and at odds with Apple's de-investment in macOS. (As in "reduced investment", not "divestment".) Adding massive complexity to eke out another hour or two of battery life seems like a poor choice when there are so many things to be fixed in the OS.
Why so? A Mac is a very high ASP item - why not, for example allow iOS apps to run in macOS (using the ARM processor). Ultimately, the 2016 MBPs are a great example of why Apple needs to divest from Intel. The poor timing for Kaby Lake mobile processors and lack of low-power RAM were both Apple's reasons stated when the topic of "the MBP isn't keeping up with the competition" arises. And who's to say that macOS.next…
I've heard similar sentiments quite a few times. However, there's little reason to believe that Apple would have been able to meet their needs better than Intel could have. It's not like Intel's development schedule was misaligned with Apple. They just couldn't get the processor out in time.