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Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#241

Post by tathougies »

Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

Apple has more experience with architecture changes than many other companies. In general, transitioning to a new processor architecture is very straightforward, and way easier than switching to a new OS.

The reason why windows on ARM never caught on was simply that windows was still available for x86. With apple it's different though, because once (Or if) they switch, then the only way to be on OS X is through the use of the new architecture.

There are a variety of features of OS X that are going to keep the design community there for the foreseeable future.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#242

Post by txsh »

uptown wrote: post #69

Tim Cook has repeatedly stated that the iPad is "the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing" and Apple only sells around 4M Macs per quarter, while iOS devices dwarf this stat. If their plan is to continue moving users from desktop/laptop devices to their iOS ecosystem, and the software can be transformed to cross between both classes of devices, then it only makes sense to unify the pr…

I don't see why a separate desktop device is needed at all.

Give us a MacOS-like desktop mode. We could connect a mouse and keyboard using bluetooth. We could airplay to a display. Even better, replace lightning with thunderbolt so we can connect our phones to an external GPU.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#243

Post by MisterTea »

israrkhan wrote: post #81

Apple has been preparing itself for independence from underlying CPU arachitecture for a while. In WWDC 2015[1], they announced bitcode. All App submissions to AppStore are compiled to to bitcode. This allows Apple to re-optimize/re-compile your app binary in the future for newer hardware without the need to submit new version of your app to the store. This allows Apple to switch to intel chip on iPhone, or switch to…

Similar to how Bell Labs Inferno worked. The kernel to user space interface was a register based VM called Dis. The entirety of user space was written in Limbo, the predecessor to Go (Both designed by Rob Pike), which allowed the whole of userspace and thus the bulk of the OS to be completely CPU independant. A JIT kept things speedy and performance penalties were about 30%. So your entire OS stack was CPU independent which allows applications to be written on an X86 machine and then ran on an Arm box with zero recopilation. True write-once-run-anywhere.

I have it built on my raspberry pi B+, Linux 32bit chroot, and there is a prebuilt Windows image available that you unzip and run.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#244

Post by pishpash »

rdsubhas wrote: post #150
jimrandomh wrote: post #30

Based on this article, it doesn't sound like Bloomberg has enough information to distinguish between Apple being committed to a transition, or Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel. It's also very unlikely to happen on such a fast timetable; given the IP situation, it's unlikely Apple could make an x86_64 chip, and any move away from x86_64 is going to require significant work by thi…

> Apple developing chips to improve their negotiating position with Intel Not necessary. They only need to ship one model of Mac Mini or any small desktop lineup with Ryzen to improve their negotiating position while still being compatible with the existing x86_64 ecosystem. So no, this is not merely a negotiation jibe. There are definite long-term prospects. We're already moving to a mobile-first design and approach…

Just the same treadmill as when toy desktops replaced workstations in the 80's.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#245

Post by ssutch3 »

bhouston wrote: post #223
Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

Adobe has a lot of stuff that works well on iOS. ARM has neon instructions for SIMD. I think they will be okay. Changing over from one SIMD architecture to another is not that hard. AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay. This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.

A lot of progress has been made recently in ARM virtualization (see its push into datacenter units). An ARM VM should run reasonably quick, and Ubuntu works fine on ARM.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#246

Post by jmull »

slededit wrote: post #207
jmull wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would surprise me, because they made a big public show of recommitting to the Mac Pro last year. If they had any doubts all they had to do was say nothing -- which is their strong preference -- and it would have remained clear that the Mac Pro was dead. Making a strong "trust us, we're working on it" statement and then canceling would be a pretty bad unforced error. Not impossible, but with their top-down, forward…

Given the failure of ARM in the datacenter Apple would be pulling something off that no other semi manufacturer has. It's not impossible but just very unlikely. It's much more reasonable that they'll do a "best effort" in the high end space but it won't be comparable to a Xeon. You can see the iMac Pro as a prelude to that. A beefy machine to be sure but not what you'd expect for top of the line.

It really depends on what exactly Apple is intending to do, which we just don't know yet.

But if they really are committed to the Mac Pro (and if this rumor is essentially true), then they must be planning something pretty extraordinary:

1. They actually have a solid plan on how they are going to make CPUs competitive with Intel Xeons over the next ~2-4 years.

2. They're planing on a bifurcated line, where some Macs have Apple CPUs and some have Intel CPUs... presumably with different architectures. I guess 2b. would be that the Apple CPUs will actually be x64 compatible.

It all seems pretty crazy, but Apple has done this kind of thing before, and done it rather smoothly. I guess time will tell.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#248

Post by wilsonnb »

otterley wrote: post #175
iguessthislldo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are not sticking with x86, it basically has to be ARM. Producing a new CPU architecture is very costly endeavor and other CPUs exist. However because they already have experience making chips for iPhone and friends and ARM is at least "good enough", it makes sense for them to go all in with ARM.

Who's to say they can't manufacture their own x86 chips a la AMD?

Better yet they can probably afford to just buy AMD.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#250

Post by baq »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

interesting, i only use my ipad as a remote to the avr so i can play tidal from my hifi... it's gathering dust otherwise.
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