331–340 of 1001 posts
I'm not going to miss Intel ME. I am going to miss running windows and linux VMs, and commercial software by microsoft, adobe, and blizzard. I'm also going to miss hand-optimized x86_64 assembly variants of ffmpeg, lame, x265, nodejs/v8, java hotspot, and more.
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…
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…
- Adobe's plans
- Apple's transition plans
- Really, anything other than the vague statement that Apple will start using their own chips in two years
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing I have a hard time trusting Intel with is the way they have handled questions around their Management Engine. I think they have done a poor job convincing us that it's safe or at least benign. It will be interesting to see if Apple includes a secretive management engine. If they do, then the speculation that it's required by one or more governments will be dialed up to 11.
With Apple's documented interest in owner's control of their devices and delivering the required documentation for it, they won't tell us what is included in the chips and what's not.
1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11596/techinsights-confirms-a...
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they'll get between 5 and 10 percent of Intel by then, but that still means that an x86 emulator is punching light, even before you get into emulation overhead. By comparison, the 68k emulator on PPC wasn't even a JIT. It just interpreted 68k machine code, and even then it was still 2x faster than a native 68k. Moore's law really helped them.with their previous transitions, but Moore ain't cashing checks like…
I’m pretty sure Rosetta wasn’t an interpreter, and Intel chips were less than 2x the speed of PowerPC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
So to start off with chips that, let's assume are only about 90% of the chips that you're replacing in native code, you're now at least under half the performance of x86 while emulating. And that means half the battery life too.
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…
If you remember back to the mid 2000's when Apple switched from PowerPC to (Intel) x86, the higher end machines still ran with PowerPC chips in them while the mid-low end products had x86 chips. All of the old applications that weren't yet ported to x86 had to use "Rosetta." It wasn't until a little while later, presumably once most of the professional software companies had good working x86 versions of their softwar…
Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job.