I'm too old for this. That's great. But what's more important to me is:
- Apple being hostile to developers: app approvals (Hey)
- Apple hardware being hard or impossible to upgrade
- MacOS turning into iOS (don't want)
Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#382Will 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?
I mean, there's nothing too magical about boot camp—even if apple removed all support for it from macOS, you can probably install windows on a partition the normal way without too much trouble. I think the only thing that might break is if Windows stopped being compatible with the Mac hardware drivers, and Apple didn't update them.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple's chips haven't supported that yet, so it's certainly something new.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#384Any hints on whether the os is getting substantially more locked down like iOS?
I don't think it's possible without making development a nightmare. Apple have committed publicly to keeping macOS Unix like and iOS touch based.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#385I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…
Apple will almost assuredly have a dedicated event later this year where they will announce new hardware. Apple has development kits running in modified Apple TV's. This is a chip that has essentially been out for a few years in iPad Pros. Why would Apple announce numbers based on this? It also assumes Apple will ship future laptops without fans or ports, which is how the development kit is coming out. Apple will mos…
The developer kit is in a Mac Mini. It has a full complement of the usual Mac Mini ports and, unless they've made major internal changes, a fan.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#386Rosetta 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.
How do you know it was for Intel?
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#387I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. Either raw power or at least power efficiency and projected battery life improvements. Seeing as this is a major reason for the transition (according to them), it feels very weird. They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's…
It was pretty much the same with PowerPC to Intel... Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance. There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case. In a lot of ways, this is far mor…
I think some of that stems from the fact that Steve Jobs was saying his own words, but everyone else is saying marketing's words. The best marketing could do to Steve was tell him that he's using a competing's brand name incorrectly. Everything else was his. So he could speak passionately in his own words.
Everyone else is acting, but they aren't actors.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#388I'm personally much more worried about the power Apple will gain from switching their hardware to ARM. This gives them such immense power, allowing them to create an even stronger walled garden environment. For all we know they could force the system to only run Mac OS?
Is this goodbye to choosing your own operating system now? Are the only people Apple cares about web and app developers? Are kernel engineers forgotten about? What about low-level hackers who like to tinker with their hardware or poke around in UEFI?
I'm more worried than excited about this.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#389I'm personally much more worried about the power Apple will gain from switching their hardware to ARM. This gives them such immense power, allowing them to create an even stronger walled garden environment. For all we know they could force the system to only run Mac OS? Is this goodbye to choosing your own operating system now? Are the only people Apple cares about web and app developers? Are kernel engineers forgott…
They could have done all of that on Intel too.
Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
#390Commenters 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; I…
> Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. Eh? This is a flimsy claim. AMD's performance/watt is extremely impressive right now. Apple is ahead of Intel for sure, but Intel isn't the only other player here. > 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 per…
AMD is tiny compared to intel, the fact that they are besting them goes to show how they have been stuck for ~5 years.
The real problem though, is that apple is actually designing a core 100% focused on the target market. Unlike intel, for whatever reason, and AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops.
So, I would expect the engineering tradeoffs for said laptop/desktop processor to show. AKA, things like hyperthreading are quite a win for servers, but at best are a wash for a desktop use case focused on extremely high single thread perf at the expense of throughput.