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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

#691

Post by jason0597 »

donarb wrote: post #483
jason0597 wrote: post #388

I'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…

Not sure what the problem is. Apple is merely transitioning to a new CPU architecture. If you're a low level developer, you'll be working in ARM assembler rather than x86 assembler.

They may be moving to a new CPU architecture, but given Apple's track record of trying to lock you into their ecosystem, I wouldn't be surprised if they made your life a living hell if you tried to install anything other than Mac OS.

Think about android smartphones for instance. I can't simply load up a new operating system by downloading the .iso file into my phone and boot into the boot selection menu just by holding down a correct button combination. No, you have to go through custom ROMs, shifty looking Russian/Chinese forums, sometimes you even have to send a kind email to your phone manufacturer to get a key so that you can load a custom ROM onto your phone.

I mean, it's bad enough already on Android. But don't you know how absolutely impossible it is on iOS? I literally buy a computer (an iPhone), and I cannot write my own programs and run them on my new computer. Is this the company we can trust with such a major transition into a new platform and architecture? How on earth can I trust Apple so that they don't require me to literally jailbreak a macbook so that I can install another operating system?

Christ, look at how annoying newer versions of Mac OS are! Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. It's a real effort to get control of your own computer back.

There's a reason some of us still run Linux. Got a binary? Run it. Just like that. No messing about. I can never trust Apple to make it as simple as this.

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

#692

Post by klelatti »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #679
klelatti wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Sorry but there is no justification for this. With the same thermal constraints there is every expectation that an Apple / Arm CPU would be more performant and efficient than a comparable x86. Why? Because aarch64 doesn't have the historical legacy that x86 has and Apple has already s…

The comparison is a bit unfair. x86 is like a decade older than ARM. Not that much in retrospect. aarch64 is as "free of historical legacy" as x86_64 is (that is: not at all free). There is lot of cruft and even multiple ISAs in aarch64 (e.g. T32/Thumb). And the CISC vs RISC arguments are questionable, seeing that Apple has done the migration in both directions by now.

Sorry meant A64 rather than aarch64 as pretty sure that Apple hasn't supported 32 bit for a while now (so no T32 or Thumb) so the instruction set was announced in 2010 and definitely cleaner than x86.

Agreed that CISC vs RISC is very questionable by now.

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

#693

Post by ryanpetrich »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #679
klelatti wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Sorry but there is no justification for this. With the same thermal constraints there is every expectation that an Apple / Arm CPU would be more performant and efficient than a comparable x86. Why? Because aarch64 doesn't have the historical legacy that x86 has and Apple has already s…

The comparison is a bit unfair. x86 is like a decade older than ARM. Not that much in retrospect. aarch64 is as "free of historical legacy" as x86_64 is (that is: not at all free). There is lot of cruft and even multiple ISAs in aarch64 (e.g. T32/Thumb). And the CISC vs RISC arguments are questionable, seeing that Apple has done the migration in both directions by now.

Apple's recent aarch64 implementations don't support any of the 32 bit ARM instruction sets, and aarch64 is a significant departure from armv7

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

#694

Post by dylan604 »

etqwzutewzu wrote: post #612
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm also predicting there will be no difference in battery life. If you check technical specifications on past MBP battery specification and battery life you can notice one thing: Watt/hour battery is always decreasing and battery life is always remaining constant (e.g., 10 hours of web scrolling). Gain in power consumption allows to reduce component space which allows further slimmer designs.

Great, they can make the laptops even slimmer. They're going to make them so thin they won't be able to put a USB-C port and use wireless charging. You'll soon learn that you don't actually need to plug anything into your device. Apple knows best.

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

#695

Post by julienb_sea »

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…

This seems very inaccurate to me. Most laptops do not have discrete GPUs, so tasks like rendering a youtube video do require CPU cycles. Zoom is very CPU intensive on basically any mac laptop, and people always have a ton of tabs open, which can be fairly CPU intensive.

In other words, there are definitely gains to be had. My ipad pro offers a generally more smooth and satisfying experience with silent and much cooler running CPU versus my MBP, and they offer similar battery life. Scale up to MBP battery size and I suspect we will be seeing a few hours battery life gain.

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

#696

Post by dijit »

user5994461 wrote: post #665
43920 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gains This doesn't really seem to match my experience; at least on a 2015 MBP, the CPU is always consuming at least 0.5-1W, even with nothing running. If I open a webpage (or…

A typical laptop display can consume around 10W all the time so the 1W from the idle CPU is negligible in comparison. If anything, you should install an adblocker. A single website filled with ads (and they're all filled with tons of ads) can spin the CPU to tens of watts forever, significantly draining the battery.

10w is on the high end of this, my 1080p screen on my Precision 5520 sucks down a paltry 1.5w at mid brightness, the big killer is the wifi chip. That takes between 1.5-5w.

CPU tends to be quite lean, until something needs to be done then steps up very quickly to consuming 45w.

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

#697

Post by santoshalper »

andy_ppp wrote: post #658
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Multi-core performance is not a strong suit of Apple's ARM architecture, I suspect you're going to see a mild to moderate performance hit for things like compilation.

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

#698

Post by dheera »

papito wrote: post #681
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Try browsing the web on a semi-decent laptop from, say, 2008. It's a frustrating experience. It is obnoxious how much CPU power modern websites require.

Join the trend! Deploy websites that mine bitcoin in the background in your viewers' web browsers.

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

#699

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

rkagerer wrote: post #597
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…

it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack So true! But from a market dominance perspective, it's also a bit terrifying.

Replace Apple with Google or Microsoft and it would get shit on around here. Apple gets a pass

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

#700

Post by [deleted] »

swebs wrote: post #494
justinfrankel wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen IMO ARM linux is great, the real thing lacking is good hardware to run it.

Yeah, I tried out a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement and pretty much everything is supported except for proprietary stuff like games.

[deleted]
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