Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by bhewes » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:17 PM UTC

mastax wrote: post #25

bhewes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Playstation 4 does this as the south bridge is really just an ARM chip. So I think you are right.

Anyone interested in this should watch the CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AoHGJ1g9aM

Yeah dude that talk was awesome.

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

#32

Post by 5ilv3r » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

Can you just imagine how long the battery would last on an arm based macbook? Days?!

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

#33

Post by Philipp__ » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

Totally expected, because they need to increase performance and lower battery consumption. Now the extent of taking job from main Intel's CPU and spectrum of possibilities of ARM coprocessors are yet to be seen. I can see it doing some hardware related tasks that do not interfere with actual higher stack of macOS and x86 space. But this is all pretty common. This title looks little clickbaity imho.

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

#34

Post by hyperbovine » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

5ilv3r wrote: post #32

Can you just imagine how long the battery would last on an arm based macbook? Days?!

It would definitely be advertised as such.

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

#35

Post by gigatexal » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

I'd always be open to Apple putting a supercharged ARM chip in a prosumer laptop. We could always run a variant of linux on the laptop if OS X were too buggy.

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

#36

Post by joezydeco » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #2

There 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.

...or iOS will be graduating up to be the new OS across both mobile and desktop platforms?

Earlier today via HN....

http://www.macworld.com/article/3163248/ios/the-future-of-io...

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

#37

Post by santaclaus » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

throwaway91111 wrote: post #30

wmf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is apple divesting its mac offering? Sounds like FUD.

This seems... suspect. There are definitely serious concerns (see the Mac Pro), but given the continued yearly releases of macOS and and the (much maligned, but a company spanning effort) touchbar, it hardly seems like they have plans to divest.

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

#38

Post by duskwuff » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:27 PM UTC

alrs wrote: post #13

There's always a hedge afoot. Apple had OS 7 running on Intel as early as 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

I would be shocked if Apple didn't have macOS running on some ARM development systems internally. It's not even that much of a stretch -- both systems use nearly the same kernel, and the iOS userspace runs on x86 as part of the iOS Simulator.

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

#39

Post by pvg » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:27 PM UTC

bostand wrote: post #19

pvg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by MekaiGS » Wed, Feb 01, 2017, 10:27 PM UTC

bitmapbrother wrote: post #28

Apple should just buy AMD. It would only cost them about 15 Billion or so and they would get an x86 license. If they really want to control their own destiny this would be the way to go.

From my understanding the x86 license is not transferable upon purchase.