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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

#651

Post by hombre_fatal »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #493
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…

You're correct that AMD’s offerings are impressive, but that‘s vs an uncooled A12 chip. Add active cooling and a few more watts there's no reason why they couldn't blow the doors off.

> You're

> AMD’s

> that‘s

What is your method of input where you use three different characters for apostrophes?

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

#652

Post by jasonhansel »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #198

I really wonder what this says about the x86 platform going forward. Mobile completely passed it by. I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc. And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much.…

x86 is only dead because CISC is dead. Now we just have to wait for Intel to go "full IBM" and try to ban people from writing emulators...

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

#653

Post by jwilliams »

paulpan wrote: post #407
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…

> What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity. I think GPU scaling will be much harder than CPU, so whereas Apple can surpass Intel CPUs for all but the highest segments, putting together a standalone GPU will be hard and very interesting to see. For an entry-level GPU? No issues. But what about a…

TSMC is too intertwined with Taiwan and Taiwanese independence to make that feasible.

Building your own fab would be a gargantuan task.

A future JV with Intel seems more likely (despite it being very unlikely in absolute terms).

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

#654

Post by jasonhansel »

xenadu02 wrote: post #615
sschueller wrote: post #298

They will lock down their PCs like the iPhone. Good luck booting anything other than macos or getting you Mac fixed anywhere other than Apple. No thanks, switching back to Linux. I'm done with this crap.

The Mac is the Mac. Apple Silicon doesn’t change that. You can set boot args, disable security, and other things the Mac has historically supported. In fact these things are required to develop 3rd-party kernel extensions which are still supported on Apple Silicon.

But will Apple let you run iOS apps in an environment where you can break iOS security guarantees? I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for sideloaded apps.

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

#655

Post by Joeri »

monocasa wrote: post #509
CharlesW wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logic isn't worth much without plugins… Rosetta 2 cross-compiles Intel binaries to ARM. Why would VST/AU plug-in binaries be an exception?

Will an ARM version of Logic support loading x86 plugins? Last time Rosetta was on a process by process basis, so you might have to make some unfortunate choices. Edit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou... > The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the same process. Rosetta translation applies to an entire process, including all code modules that the process loads d…

They could have a separate bridging process to host the x86 plugins, so we can’t know whether it does or does not support them.

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

#656

Post by r00fus »

wiremine wrote: post #201
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #102

I'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…

> I'm surprised we didn't get any performance numbers. It makes sense that they wouldn't: 1. Its dev hardware, not final production hardware. They'll want to compare the A13 or A14 (or whatever SoC they finally use) for benchmarks. 2. Until the apps are optimized, it doesn't make sense for Apple to put itself in the position of bad press with premature figures.

3. Osbourne effect avoided by not crowing about specs - those who are cautious or dependent on x86 will continue buying Intel kit. Once the new product is available and it kicks the daylight out of the legacy, they will already have their pareto-split of interest in their new offerings.

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

#657

Post by snemvalts »

ianhowson wrote: post #650
Teknoman117 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't need to deal with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go into their SoC. This is sort-of-OK for consumers but amazing for Apple and its shareholers.

Apple's services already make more money than their Mac business. There aren't enough macs sold for this to have a big impact

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

#658

Post by andy_ppp »

ianhowson wrote: post #561
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…

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

I actually think total battery life will go up a fair bit and compile times will be much faster, 20-30%, while giving everyone full power when not on the mains. The amount my MacBook throttles when on battery is startling and stopping that while still giving huge battery life, say 6h at 80% CPU will be a huge win. Apple wouldn’t bother unless they knew the benefits they can bring over the next 10 years will be huge.

All of this is complete speculation of course but I don’t believe it will be a financial decision this one, it’ll be about creating better products.

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

#659

Post by steveklabnik »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #638
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…

Why do feel that Rust is behind on ARM? I can't comment on the performance, but everything that I used that was purely written in Rust compiled and ran perfectly on my PineBook Pro. (with the exception of alacritty, but that's because PBP doesn't support OpenGL 3.x) Go does have the (platform) advantage (?) of preferring the "rewrite everything in Go" approach, so those just transition when the tooling supports a new…

Rust and ARM is just fine. For example, Cloudflare famously keeps their entire stack cross-compilable to ARM, and even ships Rust on iPhones.

There's two areas where I believe you could call it second-class at the moment, though:

1. There is no ARM targets in Rust's "Tier 1" platform support.

2. std::arch doesn't have ARM intrinsics in stable.

For 1, ARM targets are in a weird space; they aren't Tier 1, but they're closer than most of the other Tier 2 targets. Several ARM targets are Tier 1 for Firefox, for example, so they get a bunch of work done there.

For 2, well, there hasn't been as much demand before. I expect that to change because of this.

... we'll see what the future holds :)

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