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

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

#321

Post by iagooar »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253
egypturnash wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

ARM less powerful? Wait and see what Apple can do with their own ARM-design if they target Desktops / Laptops. We might get to see 32 or even 64 cores in a regular MBP. Now tell me how THAT would be less powerful than the current Intel offering.

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

#322

Post by saagarjha »

drham wrote: post #299
Bud wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.

Faster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.

Presumably their "desktop-grade" A-whatever chip will have a higher TDP and clock speed than their mobile counterparts.

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

#323

Post by ajross »

Bud wrote: post #281
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.

That's not remotely true. There is some crossover, which is notable. But that means that the fastest iPhone is faster than some of the slower desktops. Intel's current single core leader is a coffee lake running at 4.7 GHz with like 12MB of core-speed cache. Be real.

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

#324

Post by mozumder »

drham wrote: post #299
Bud wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "likely" at all. Apple's CPUs are already faster in single-core benchmarks than the Intel competition, even though the Apple processors in question are designed for mobile devices and have much less power to work with. Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.

Faster, probably, but 2x+ Faster like in PowerPC > Intel very unlikely. Which is why there’s much less likely to be enough performance budget for effective emulation.

Computer architectures routinely see 3x performance jumps across different power budgets. This rule has held over decades.

Clock speeds alone can probably increase by 30%. Caches and internal datapaths can double or more. Then you can start to add in more execution units or more expensive branch-prediciton or even new more power-hungry instructions.

A 4 Watt Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake for mobile devices gets about 1800 on Geekbench, while a 115 Watt Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake for desktops gets 5600.

I'm just going to say it: the Apple laptop CPU is going to get Geekbench score... above 9000!

And, yes, I do have a CPU design background.

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

#325

Post by bitL »

MisterTea wrote: post #243
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 independen…

Pity people still propel horrible names of software we had since 60s... How can any outsider take us seriously?

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

#326

Post by saagarjha »

iagooar wrote: post #321
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

ARM less powerful? Wait and see what Apple can do with their own ARM-design if they target Desktops / Laptops. We might get to see 32 or even 64 cores in a regular MBP. Now tell me how THAT would be less powerful than the current Intel offering.

Apple has always gone down the path of fewer, more powerful cores instead of packing many, weaker ones. Apple's chips were dual core until A10.

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

#327

Post by mynameisvlad »

saagarjha wrote: post #318
criddell wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has done a very good job with documenting iOS security: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf If they included a management engine and produced a document like that, I'd be satisfied.

Apple is probably going to produce a similar document that details at a high level how the security works. If they follow the example that they set with iOS devices, what they won't do is provide the source code for these components.

I mean, of course, it's still their right to release or keep any source code they produce. We shouldn't be expecting them to release the source code, but even a whitepaper is better than what Intel is doing.

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

#328

Post by lykr0n »

CharlesW wrote: post #307
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

> In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors… Arguably, the A11 Bionic is already faster than mainstream desktop CPUs. "The iPhone 8 even edged out the score from the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with a 7th-generation Core i5 processor. That notebook notched 9,213. Is Geekbench 4 really comparable from phone to desktop? According to the founder of Geekbench, John Poole, 'the short is ans…

Geekbench is a poor tool. Maybe for simple mathematical operations, but x86-64 has a larger instruction set than what the A11 supports

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

#329

Post by saagarjha »

feedmeseymour wrote: post #266
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…

I don't feel that the parent comment was "niche". This argument comes up every time anyone discusses a architecture switch, and the invariable response is that Apple has already done this twice before with an emulation layer.

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

#330

Post by freedomben »

feedmeseymour wrote: post #266
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…

Yep, it's the slow death of the general purpose computer (Cory Doctorow reference).
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