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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

#381

Post by phire »

vondur wrote: post #368

I wonder if Apple is maybe looking at AMD for chips? That would be a much less painful switch instead of transitioning to ARM for the Desktop.

It's unlikely. Apple has shown a clear trend towards trying to get rid of absolutely any 3rd party components from their devices. They want the control that full vertical integration gives them.

The got rid of the 3rd party ARM design in their iphones/ipads, going for their own ARM/AARCH64 design. They are currently in the process of getting rid of the PowerVR GPU, to be replaced with their own GPU.

Moving to their own AARCH64 CPU for laptops/desktops fits with that trend. Many people have been wondering 'when' this will happen, not if.

Moving to AMD doesn't fit with this long term trend.

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

#382

Post by saagarjha »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #212

Is this maybe why they are looking for Linux kernel developers? Tim Pritlove predicted this move for some years now on his freakshow(.fm). Anyway the only interesting thing to me is if they will share a codebase between macOs and ios or if they will create something new and not based on darwin. Maybe they will take the step steve didn't want and switch to linux.

I seriously doubt this will happen. Why would they throw away three decades of work that's known to work on both x86 and ARM?

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

#383

Post by Stranger43 »

htormey wrote: post #226
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…

How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven? If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?

Sure nvidia could build a traditional co-processor card(just like in the old SBUS days) but what are the chance of apple releasing hardware with that kind of extendability after going all in on the IOSification of the mac?, even thunderbolt(which is a much lower level bus then USB3) did not support the same kind of performance as a proper PCIe slot.

And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space.

You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.

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

#384

Post by saagarjha »

erric wrote: post #163
TheSoftwareGuy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the question marks but I'm not entirely sure what your questions actually are

It was just a stream of consciousness and I was planning on editing it but got distracted. It also wasn't formatted very well. My mistake. I'm sure this has been going on for a long time behind the scenes. That is what happened when the PPC -> x86 transition became public. Since Apple has it's own ARM chips/fab, I wonder if ARM is where they are going? It would make sense from a couple different points of view: Lower…

Your concerns would be better founded if this was news of iOS coming to desktop instead of Apple switching desktop processors.

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

#386

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Bud wrote: post #283
huebnerob wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last point may be a bit of an understatement. It's going to absolutely annihilate x86 virtualization on the Mac. Like, I don't think parallels or VMware will even attempt to write an x86 emulator for ARM, they'll just pack up and leave. But the Mac thrived for a very long time without x86 compatibility, and it can do the same again, virtualization was always kind of a happy accident for us anyway.

Parallels and VMWare will just abandon their primary market? No they won't.

Didn't Parallels start off with an Intel emulation before Apple switched to x86.

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

#387

Post by RI_Swamp_Yankee »

phire wrote: post #265

Does anyone remember Intel's random rant about how "emulation of x86 violates our intellectual property" from last year? https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-sti... Intel didn't name names, and everyone at the time assumed it was related to Microsoft and their efforts to ship windows 10 on ARM with a 32 bit only x86 emulator. But I wonder if that rant was actually aimed at Apple. Microsoft's emula…

That would put Intel in the crosshairs of anti-trust. The have a defacto monopoly on personal computer processors, and this sounds like an abuse of their market position to stifle innovation.

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

#388

Post by saagarjha »

samstave wrote: post #230

What I find funny is that in ~2006 I had a net eng working for me that was a die-hard Mac fan. I claimed at the time, that I would bet him that apple would start making machines with Intel chips. He LOST it and said "THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!" And thought I was a complete moron for even suggesting as such. :-)

This was public knowledge in 2005…

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

#389

Post by emodendroket »

tambourine_man wrote: post #73

That would be the end of the Hackintosh, which would be kind of a shame. Even having never built one myself, it remained a last resort of some kind in the back of my mind.

For someone not still in high school that struck me as way more effort than it was worth.

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

#390

Post by tootie »

Lramseyer wrote: post #300
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…

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…

Couldn't they achieve that today by running legacy apps in a hypervisor?
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