Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by jcadam » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

jernfrost wrote: post #231

jcadam wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has been trying to chase power users and professionals off of their platform for years. A switch to ARM is an opportunity to rid themselves of the few remaining holdouts and focus 100% on high-end consumer electronics.

I would say that is more about the boxes they use than CPU. The difficulty of adding your own hard drives, memory, graphics cards etc to a Mac is the biggest problem I think. What pro task, really requires high single thread performance? I imagine Apple could match intel by simply using more cores on their ARM CPUs.

True, I miss the old Powermac towers: Workstation class machines, but with low-end configurations for those of us on a budget. When I was faced with the choice between:

- an iMac that didn't really meet my needs

- a ridiculously unaffordable Mac Pro tower

I jumped over to Linux running on commodity PC hardware.

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

#262

Post by Stranger43 » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

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.

But adobe's arm work is probably related a completely different series of products directed at the not quite a demanding pro segment of the market, and you still need to port autoCAD something they might not think is worth it.

The problem is that you are not just porting from a low TDP atom(by any other name) chip with a intel gfx card but a class of computers that include dual Xeon systems with 2 or more high end ati cards, to something that don't really scale upwards from a macbook air in terms of raw power.

And when you remember how badly outperformed even the highest spec mac pro is compared to their competitors, who is likely still going to be around a decade from now the question is to what extend a maker of high margin niche product targeted at demanding professionals(with corporate procurement budgets) to even consider supporting the mac with anything but a simplified html5 based consumer version that lacks most of the advanced features going forward.

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

#263

Post by old-gregg » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #72

AMD has the rights to produce x86 compatible CPUs. If Apple were to design the chips but AMD manufactured them on contract, would that avoid IP/licensing issues with Intel?

AMD does not manufacture anything, they've gone 100% fabless. Their former manufacturing arm had been spun off into https://www.globalfoundries.com, which also absorbed IBM's fab tech.

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

#264

Post by olivermarks » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

api wrote: post #236

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…

My concern is that they are going to completely lock down and cripple MacOS and turn it into iOS, making it worthless as a professional machine. The CPU doesn't matter but the versatility and user-centric-ness of the OS does. If they're talking about making MacOS more like iOS I think it might be time to start looking for the exit. A laptop/desktop is not just a portable dumb terminal for accessing siloed cloud servi…

I agree and it's unlikely my next laptop will be an Apple device...

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

#265

Post by phire » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

Does anyone remember Intel's random rant about how "emulation of x86 violates our intellectual property" from last year?

https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti...

Intel didn't name names, and everyone at the time assumed it was related to Microsoft and their efforts to ship windows 10 on ARM with a 32 bit only x86 emulator.

But I wonder if that rant was actually aimed at Apple. Microsoft's emulator only needs to target a older subset of x86, one that could avoid ant patented instructions.

If Apple are planning to move from x86 to arm, they will need an emulator that supports full 64bit with some relatively recent extensions that all MacOS applications target by default.

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

#266

Post by feedmeseymour » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

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…

Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO.

These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry."

Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.

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

#267

Post by olympus » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

enitihas wrote: post #258

olympus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to go toe to toe with low-power areas says little about being able to compete against full-power areas, and vice versa. Intel is a laughing stock when trying to compete in low power areas even though they dominate full power. ARM is the only choice in low power outside of a few Chinese chips and Samsung's Exynos, but yet ARM hasn't made a dent in full power applications. The two areas do not scale as easil…

Isn't Exynos also ARM?

You're right, for some reason I was thinking Exynos wasn't ARM based because it wasn't Qualcomm- not sure why. That takes the list of ARM competition down to just the Chinese offerings, unless I'm mistaken about that.

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

#268

Post by armadsen » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #239

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 done this twice already. 680x0 to PowerPC, then PowerPC to Intel. Adobe's come along on both of these.

As have Microsoft and other major companies. Unless you're writing large portions of the code in assembly language, porting to a new operating system can be greatly eased by the developer tools. In the past, Apple has provided a transitional emulation layer that meant that even architecture-specific code ran on their new machines.

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

#269

Post by mynameisvlad » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #241

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 u…

Well, except it's not that simple at all. Even if they immediately discontinue all previous models and only introduce new architecture models in one go, you still have several years worth of computers sitting on x86/x64. They won't be able to get rid of it in the OS until at least the mid-2020s.

As an example with the PPC->x86 move, they released Rosetta in 2005, stopped pre-installing it in 2009, and only in 2011 did then completely remove the ability to install it. I foresee a similar experience here.

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

#270

Post by abakker » Mon, Apr 02, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

htormey wrote: post #226

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…

How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven? If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?

I use both Adobe and Autodesk, and neither yet support eGPU well. Essentially, if they wrote their own graphics engines (both adobe and autodesk did) then eGPU doesn't work that well. Lightroom has started to come over, and some features of Fusion360 seem to work OK, too, but for the most part the only eGPU accelerated parts of the apps seem to be the user interfaces.

Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.