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

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

#461

Post by monocasa »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #450
kllrnohj wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 small though. I have no data to back up my gut but anecdotally I feel like they don't have the manufacturing capacity to keep up with Apple's demands right now.

The chips are going to be manufactured by TSMC whether they're AMD or Apple chips.

And the game consoles show that AMD can put together a secure, x86 chip at high volumes at leading nodes.

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

#462

Post by slantyyz »

Corrado wrote: post #236
pathartl wrote: post #114

I think this is RIP to the Mac Pro for anyone that cares about extensibility. I can't see Apple making a board with a socketed CPU of their own silicon. I'd even say something like RAM would be a stretch.

Yea, I wonder what the Mac Pro is going to look like in a couple of years. Then again, they could stuff it with 100 A19z processors and have a 1024 thread machine (or something equally outrageous).

I have to think it's going to be tiny, cool (as in temperature) and use a fraction of the electricity that the latest Mac Pro does.

As for the pro software that currently requires a physical dongle for DRM, I'm guessing those vendors will be forced into the Mac App Store with Apple managing access to the software for them.

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

#463

Post by [deleted] »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #450
kllrnohj wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 small though. I have no data to back up my gut but anecdotally I feel like they don't have the manufacturing capacity to keep up with Apple's demands right now.

[deleted]

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

#464

Post by reggieband »

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.

It depends on where your perception of "where everyone else already was" in this context.

Is the future more like Intel desktops or more like ARM-based mobile devices? If you think the latter then Apple is definitely moving towards where people will be (insert Gretzky quote: "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.)

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

#465

Post by enos_feedler »

0x0 wrote: post #391
bgorman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM doesn't really matter very much to Apple - Apple designs the micro-architecture and many (most?) of the other SOC components themselves. With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM

But the instruction set (ISA) absolutely matters for the entire software ecosystem!

No, the custom silicon matters more. They've spent years building infrastructure to make it easy to change late stage code generation to multiple ISAs.

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

#466

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters 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 doesn’t control their machine learning stack. The models they ship are likely created and trained on PCs running Linux and NVIDIA GPUs. It’s entirely possible they’ll extend the Neural Engine to be useful for training but they’d still need to contribute or convince others to contribute to the existing tooling.

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

#467

Post by djxfade »

MarcScott wrote: post #448

This maybe a naïve question, so feel free to educate me. If more software developers now need to target ARM architecture, does that mean that it will be easier to port software to other hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi, or is it not that simple?

Not really. Native apps for macOS are targeting Apple specific APIs. It might help for cross platform applications that do low lever asm optimizations though.

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

#468

Post by vletal »

The mention of virtualization in the official press-release is awkward [1]

> Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux.

How does it relate to the switch to ARM?

Did they get finally worried about success of WSL on Windows and aim to compete in that area?

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...

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

#470

Post by hellofunk »

> macOS will support native iOS apps and macOS apps side-by-side on these new machines in the future.

I wonder what that means. There's more to the chip -- what about the core APIs for UI? Does that mean CocoaTouch and UIKit will run natively on macOS?

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