Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#331

Post by wiremine »

kllrnohj wrote: post #309
wiremine wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, it is a very small part of the market, but I'm not sure I grok your point. I think Apple's has leapfrogged Intel in some ways?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#332

Post by masklinn »

fomine3 wrote: post #193
theshrike79 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A12Z is already faster than every tablet and phone in existence. Depending on the benchmark, it smokes about 80% of off the shelf PC hardware. They really don't need to do that much.

I believe Apple can make processors for laptop and normal desktop in A-series way but I'm curious how they make for Mac Pro. Adopting architecture like chiplet?

Mayhaps ARM will be for non-pro lines at least initially aka Macbook (Air?), then iMac, and possibly later MBPs and Mac Pro?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#333

Post by wtallis »

mikece wrote: post #60

Will BootCamp continue to be supported for the next ten years on my June 2019 MacBook Pro so I can install an operating system that continues to develop new features with the assumption I'm running on x86-64?

What do you mean by "continue to be supported"? Your 2019 MBP will only need new drivers for Windows if Microsoft decides to change things. Otherwise, Apple doesn't have to do anything at all for your current MBP to continue to be able to run Windows. While Windows may be something of a moving target, your particular machine isn't.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#334

Post by LeoPanthera »

mrkstu wrote: post #85

Rosetta 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.

> Rosetta won't work for run time environments like OS emulation

They literally showed a demo of Parallels with Ubuntu for Intel running inside it.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#335

Post by yannikyeo »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #204

I'd imagine Photoshop and other media apps are highly optimized for x86, so do have they have Adobe and other developers on board to port code over to ARM? Will they provide Rosetta-like instruction set translation?

The keynote shows Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop running on ARM Mac.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#336

Post by chpmrc »

mantap wrote: post #116
aldanor wrote: post #40

So, 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.

Right, apparently only a quarter of all developers uses them (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...).

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#338

Post by monocasa »

pkulak wrote: post #318
monocasa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.

On the other hand, it probably doesn't use much CPU just because it's single threaded. No game ever uses more than 10% of my 16-thread CPU. But that also means that emulation could seriously tank single-thread performance and ruin the game.

It might be the other way around. The might have gotten around the big issue with running arbitrary x86 code on ARM (the way weaker memory model) by pinning all x86 threads in a process to a single core. Which would be unfortunate.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#339

Post by mkozlows »

ksec wrote: post #258

Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Qu…

1. They explicitly said yes, there would be a whole range of CPUs that they're making. This isn't just "throw the phone CPU on a desktop," they'll have laptop class and desktop class CPUs that are different.

2. They're saying integrated. Whether they also throw Radeons on high-end desktops is probably not yet determined. (They have a two year roadmap for this rollout, and I think it's pretty obvious they'll start with the portables/iMacs where the benefits of ARM are more likely to outweigh the pain of change for more people.)

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#340

Post by ghostpepper »

fomine3 wrote: post #314
moduspol wrote: post #174

Earlier 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.

But this is WWDC...

Sure, the D stands for Developers, but how many of those developers care about things like CPU microarchitecture?

Aren't they mostly web/app developers?

Post reply on HN