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Macintel: The End Is Nigh

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Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#61

Post by higherpurpose »

Symmetry wrote: post #45
ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

You say that ARM chips are 10x slower than Haswells, but the difference isn't actually that large anymore and for Apple's A7 it's around 3x versus a normal desktop chip like the 4770 and only 1.7X versus the 4250U you'd find in a Macbook Air[1]. Diminishing returns is a constant factor in engineering and I'd expect it to be very hard for Apple to make up the remaining distance between themselves and Intel, but we sho…

The difference is actually smaller, since we're comparing to a 1.3 Ghz Air, not a 3.3 Ghz (or whatever) desktop chip.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#62

Post by alialkhatib »

dgallagher wrote: post #50
ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

What if Apple introduced workstation-class ARM another way; made a really powerful iPad/iPhone which could sit in a dock with keyboard/mouse/monitor, and run both iOS and ARM OSX? x86 computers could continue to exist for high-end users, but typical-users might be content with a hybrid tablet/computer. As ARM increased in power, x86 might dissapear entirely. Your comments on Windows compatibility/virtualization are s…

What you're describing (a mobile device that docks into a workstation environment and powers the KVM) sounds like the dream mobile product designers have been having for well over a decade. I remember Canonical recently coming up with a concept of a phone that would do this (see: Ubuntu Edge[0]). That being said, the roadmap implied by iOS 8 and Yosemite strongly suggests that they're just going to bridge these gaps over the Internet. Google is also pretty clearly going in this direction, and given the ubiquity of Internet access (especially compared to available KVM terminals), I think this is the direction we're all going to go in.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#63

Post by higherpurpose »

ggreer wrote: post #26

What would happen to the cost, battery life, and size of an A10-powered MacBook Air? It would be worse in almost every aspect. The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price . Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts. Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air g…

The discounts aren't that "huge" when compared to ARM chip prices. They are only "huge" in comparison to other Intel customers. But the difference still remains something close to an order of magnitude.

It's been shown before that Intel chips make up roughly 40 percent of the BOM/retail price (however you want to account it) of a PC. I doubt it's less than say 30 percent for an Apple Mac.

The retail price for a high-end chip is like $30, max. The retail price for a Core i5 can be more than $300. So yes, I think the pricing difference can be significant. Or rather the profit difference for Apple.

Apple could basically sell an ARM-based Macbook Air for $700, and make the same amount of profit per unit - BUT, sell a lot more of them, since they're $700 per unit. Apple could also sell it for $800, and make a lot more in profit per unit, too.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#64

Post by higherpurpose »

fiatmoney wrote: post #29

"The aging x86 architecture is beset by layers of architectural silt accreted from a succession of additions to the instruction set... Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more transistors than its ARM-based equivalent" I wish people would stop saying this. On the inside, x86 CPUs are basically RISC. There is a translation layer from the publicly facing instruction layer to the internal representation. T…

Intel chips even support 16-bit processing. How is that not baggage?

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#65

Post by Kadin »

JohnBooty wrote: post #32

From the article: > Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more > transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it > consumes more power and must dissipate more heat. This is true but it ignores the primary reality of "desktop class" processor design today: RAM is the bottleneck in a really major way and most of a desktop class CPU's transistors are dedicated to overcoming this. In the ancient days,…

Agreed. To expand:

The "excess baggage" argument being made in the article dates back decades, to the earliest RISC vs. CISC days, and within the Mac ecosystem that argument ended when Apple ditched PowerPC and went to x86.

Back in the 1990s you could make a pretty good argument for RISC architectures vs CISC ones like x86, because the circuitry for all those "extra" instructions took up a lot of die space. But new processes have meant that the percentage of die space that must be devoted to the x86 instruction set gets smaller and smaller with each generation. In other words, if x86 was going to lose out to RISC architectures, it would have happened in the 1990s. Their advantage has only eroded since then.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#66

Post by sah88 »

An ARM based Air might make a nice facebook machine but what about Pros/Desktop and the high performance market? I really doubt there are any ARM chips anywhere near the performance of an i7. What are they going to do segment their PC lineup or just abandon the high performance side? I doubt they are willing to do either.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#68

Post by Glide »

RexRollman wrote: post #23
martingordon wrote: post #18

I think it's funny that the main reason people cite the need to switch from Intel to ARM is power consumption. A big reason to stay on Intel is that a lot of people have real needs to run Windows software (whether in Bootcamp or a VM). Switchers feel a lot better jumping to the Mac if they could fall back to Windows if they wanted to. Regarding battery life: The latest MacBooks get 9-12 hours of battery life. I haven…

I recently switched back to Mac for the first time since 2006 and one of the factors in my decision is that I can run other x86 compatable OSes. I haven't felt the need to but it is nice to have the option.

Compatibility with x86 is a lot like why people don't buy purely electric cars. Being able to run another OS is much like being able to take a very long road trip.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#69

Post by deong »

geon wrote: post #41
twotwotwo wrote: post #10

Apple does look like it's making chips to handle heavy workloads, not just to compete with the latest Krait or whatever. But I'm not sure ARM Macs are the direction they'll take that. It'd make some business sense for them to instead position iOS so it can take over more and more traditional Mac duties. The IBM push could be an example of that. Investing in iOS gives Apple the tight control and the 30% cut they're us…

> why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps? The problem should be much smaller on OS X than on Windows. Apple has a culture of breaking things regularly, instead of worshipping backwards compatabillity. The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. Recompiling for an arm-based OS X shouldn't be an issue.

> The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer.

That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.

Re: Macintel: The End Is Nigh

#70

Post by justincormack »

ggreer wrote: post #47

While I think the article's prediction is incorrect (see my other comment for why), it did give me an idea: Why doesn't Apple design their own x86 CPU? Their work on the Ax series has probably taught them quite a bit that could be ported over to x86-land. Also, Apple could leave out x86 cruft they don't use: legacy addressing modes, PAE, etc. And of course, they could design the CPU specifically for their products in…

You can't without a license from Intel, for various patents etc. Well it has been tried see http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-... for a brief history, but it is pretty hard, most of the people who used to make x86 chips (Transmeta, NEC, ...) have dropped out.
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