They talked about virtualization but they only showed Parallels Desktop. Is just a virtualization layer for x86 on ARM or are they going to provide something like Hyper V on Windows?
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#302My burning question...
Made in China or the USA?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#303I really wonder what this says about the x86 platform going forward. Mobile completely passed it by. I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc. And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much.…
Intel has either squandered the tech and we will see drastic improvements soon or possibly they’ll fall closer toward the dustbin of history. I suspect the later since they’ve been stuck at various points of specifications for a decade plus. Or they do something novel for once. I wouldn’t count them out of a breakthrough into new architectures/fab processes entirely.
My comment was meant to be more general than Intel. I’m even including AMD here. x86 has no presence in mobile (that ship has sailed) and again I’m seeing quite a lot of innovation on ARM side wrt server-class processors. Not sure how traditional PCs will play out but Macs are going to split off from x86 within years.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#304So, if I install numpy via conda on a Mac now, it's backed by Intel MKL and is thus amazingly fast. What will it be replaced with? Has anyone at Apple thought about use cases like this?..
PCs are for gaming. PCs are for work. Macs are for... students and middle managers apparently.
And about 30% of software devs, according to Stack Overflow.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#305Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers.
Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip.
Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.
Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.
Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.
So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.
I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be very interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.
One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.
Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#306Wow, after a couple of decades of pointing and laughing, I might finally have to buy a Mac. Assuming, of course, they don't stick their own Management Engine-alike in there.
It's already there (T2 chip) but without (?) remote access.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they even used the term "ARM" at any point. They're calling it "Apple's silicon," and they acknowledged it's the same as what iPhone and iPad use. But I thought it was interesting how they seemed to avoid the term. It's probably just a matter of avoiding getting too "techy" and marketing.
The first guy in the "lab" scene (Johny maybe?) mentioned plenty of other "techy" terms. I think that they want to distance themselves from other ARM manufacturers and put the focus on Apple's advantages over Qualcomm and others.
True. I think you're right.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#308Rosetta 2 - the interesting bit was that it was going to pre-translate binaries instead of at runtime. The implications for actual VM emulation is that Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation. They touched on it briefly with the emulation technologies bit, but it looks like it will be separate from, and likely much less performant than Rosetta.
They explicitly said that it can perform both static and dynamic translation for JITs. I wouldn't be surprised if there is substantial hardware support too.
My brain skipped over that part apparently. It is interesting that they are calling out virtualization improvements separately though.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#309Tim Cook just said they have new intel macs in the pipeline. Those will go over like a lead balloon.
If the PowerPC to Intel transition was any indication, they'll do just fine. Most consumers won't care, or will want to wait until Apple works out the kinks. To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won't be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread. Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales. History is repeating itself, it's worth reviewing…
With the powerpc to x86 transition Apple was moving towards where everyone else already was. It was one less thing developers had to worry about when supporting Mac. With this migration it's the opposite, and MacOS is still a very small slice of the desktop/laptop market.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rosetta. Apple knows processors, ARM is just a licensed instruction set.
To be clear, it's not a virtual machine. Rosetta translates x86 instructions to ARM instructions on the fly.
I wonder if this is actually even related to the original Rosetta (which was actually an external vendor - QuickTransit by Transitive), acquired by IBM. Most of the Transitive team left IBM to go to Arm and Apple.