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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

#191

Post by scholia »

renesd wrote: post #178
jlawer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There will certainly be ARM-based laptops running Windows 10. Have you looked into that?

They are different from the Surface RT (Windows on ARM) machines because the also run traditional x86 apps (not just a port of Office).

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

#192

Post by scholia »

some-guy wrote: post #138
pvg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculating about what Apple's going to do is a great way to be wrong but I don't really see it. In both of their CPU migrations the switch was to substantially more powerful CPUs. I can see them making more 'pro' iOS devices, Macs with ARMs as coprocessors, etc. Ditching Intel altogether? I can't think of ways the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages.

My guess is that the CPU "leap" will be in power efficiency rather than raw performance. My guess is that the returns for each jump in CPU power these days isn't helping the vast majority of users, but they certainly care about battery life.

The Core M in the MacBook is already down to 4.5W. How much lower would the ARM go, while delivering the same performance? Speculation welcome ;-)

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

#193

Post by renesd »

scholia wrote: post #191
renesd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There will certainly be ARM-based laptops running Windows 10. Have you looked into that? They are different from the Surface RT (Windows on ARM) machines because the also run traditional x86 apps (not just a port of Office).

Yes, good point. It will be interesting to see how popular they are this year. I also wonder if Office performance will be good enough for most people. I'm pretty sure MS know what they are doing with that, and the answer will be yes.

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

#194

Post by jolux »

rz2k wrote: post #172
__jal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's running a stripped-down watchOS actually

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

#195

Post by scholia »

renesd wrote: post #193
scholia wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will certainly be ARM-based laptops running Windows 10. Have you looked into that? They are different from the Surface RT (Windows on ARM) machines because the also run traditional x86 apps (not just a port of Office).

Yes, good point. It will be interesting to see how popular they are this year. I also wonder if Office performance will be good enough for most people. I'm pretty sure MS know what they are doing with that, and the answer will be yes.

I'll buy one if they are cheap and include a sim slot. It would basically be a smartphone with Windows desktop software (mostly Office in my case) running on an 11.6-inch screen...

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

#196

Post by scholia »

paulmd wrote: post #185
scholia wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The ultra-performance professionals ... often do their own builds and then keep upgrading them. 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…

Not entirely convinced. The cheesegrater Mac design let you upgrade on the fly...

I certainly agree about the scale problem, but Apple has never really competed in that market. You could easily buy 1,500 Dells but the graphics department only got 6 Mac Pros. And they still upgraded them in ways that weren't too onerous.

> Apple still has some pretty serious mind-share in the professional market, although it fades year over year

Yes. Sadly for Apple, that self-build or custom-built PC gives you double the performance for half the price. When time is money, it makes a big difference.

And if you're running Adobe software, it's not that big a shift.

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

#197

Post by flamedoge »

magila wrote: post #135
5ilv3r wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. Arm chips just don't clock as high as intels can, and no one* cares about clock speed any more. That ship has sailed. Multiprocess web browsers will drive the sales of massively multicore arms (with tons of ram!), and intel will be sunk.

It's not just about clock speed. While Intel Core CPUs don't scale down to power budgets as low as ARM cores, they are impressively efficient on a perf/watt basis. Smart phones achieve high battery life mostly by being very aggressive about reducing CPU load in software (see iOS killing apps the moment they go into the background). General purpose operating systems don't work like that so there's more reliance on the…

sounds like Intel hit a pretty sweet work/watt by increasing work while keeping lid on wattage. ARM delivers battery life by lowering work.

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

#198

Post by Tanegashima »

wmf wrote: post #26
mmastrac wrote: post #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 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.

Either your prove that assertion of "reduced investment" or you retract your comment.

Apple haters...

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

#199

Post by Tanegashima »

mortenjorck wrote: post #43
throwaway91111 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is apple divesting its mac offering? Sounds like FUD.

Divestment is an oversimplification of the direction Apple seems to be taking the Mac. Consolidation would be a better term: trying to prune the product line into a lineup of hits and nothing else, often to the exclusion of non-mainstream (professional) users. So the test to apply is: will this enable a headline feature? In this case, if it lets Apple put a significantly bigger battery life number on the product page…

Proof?

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

#200

Post by Tanegashima »

scholia wrote: post #171
throwaway91111 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I'm not a fan of the new MBP myself, but I don't think they're ignoring professional users. Didn't their MBP sales go UP?

There was pent-up demand from people who had been holding off buying the old model....

Because you can't buy something else from the PC industry?

If there is pent up demand, it's because Apple has been treating their costumeira much better than every other OEM.

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