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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

#741

Post by thefounder »

dylan604 wrote: post #694
etqwzutewzu wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> You'll soon learn that you don't actually need to plug anything into your device. Apple knows best.

A wireless solution is long-awaited.

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

#742

Post by pathartl »

jimnotgym wrote: post #704
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…

> those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel. And yet the new Macbook pro base models feature an 8th Gen Core i5. That is 2 generations behind the bleeding edge. I think some people might be experiencing the speed problems you described because their machine has an old gen processor in a shiny new box

Not to mention that Apple setting a standard of throttling at 100c and not giving the machines adequate cooling affects performance in a non-trivial fashion.

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

#743

Post by xenadu02 »

jasonhansel wrote: post #654
xenadu02 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how much clearer things can be. The Mac remains a Mac. It can run software from outside the App Store. That applies to Apple Silicon. This was specifically called out in the SOTU stream.

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

#744

Post by nicoburns »

santoshalper wrote: post #697
andy_ppp wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The rumours are that they're doubling the number of high-performance cores for the laptop chips (so 8 high performance cores and 4 low-power cores). That + better cooling ought to boost the multi-core performance quite significantly.

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

#745

Post by mavhc »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #257
mavhc wrote: post #127

Do you think they rewrote Mac OS for ARM, or altered iOS to look like Mac OS? Or have they secretly been in sync for the past 10 years? It's been 9 years since they rewrote Final Cut, and 7 years for Logic Pro, both rewritten for this day

They probably just recompiled for arm and optimized any pain points.

Wonder how much code is shared between Mac OS and iOS, they can't be putting that much effort into Mac OS when it sells 10x less devices than iOS unless it's mostly shared.

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

#746

Post by mantap »

chpmrc wrote: post #336
mantap wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCs are for gaming. PCs are for work. Macs are for... students and middle managers apparently.

Right, apparently only a quarter of all developers uses them ( https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... ).

Including me. Will those same developers buy a machine that is completely locked down? I will not.

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

#747

Post by Stratoscope »

old-gregg wrote: post #588
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…

I'll bite. > Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is > roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from > any other manufacturer. We haven't been able to compare them. Micro-benchmarks do not count because mobile versions of Apple chips haven't been designed for desktop requirements. People love comparing CPU cores with micro-benchmarks, but the hardest thing for a modern desktop/server chip is to feed…

> P.S. I love how "old-tech" HN is, but for the love of god, give us a decent way to "reply with quote".

You have to copy and paste, but that's not too hard, even on mobile.

The main thing is to not use code formatting, and not break up a quoted sentence or paragraph into multiple lines.

Instead, do it the way I quoted your comment above, like this:

  > *Entire quoted paragraph.*
That will render nicely on all devices regardless of the length of the paragraph. If you quote multiple paragraphs, add a blank line between each paragraph so they don't run together.

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

#748

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

grandmczeb wrote: post #740
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will work out fine. Apple has an absolutely top-shelf team, designing chips. By hand (Qualifier: Not sure if they still do, but they did, while everyone else was using automation). They also have a great deal of experience in repaving the highway while traffic is running at capacity. They mentioned it in their keynote. They've done it three times. I have been there, for each of those times. I was also ther…

> By hand Not using automation isn’t “badass”, it’s a sign of a deeply screwed up engineering culture. It’s on par with forcing software developers to program exclusively in machine code. Luckily, Apple uses the standard EDA tools pretty extensively so I don’t really think this applies to them. I also agree that Apple hardware engineers are generally extremely good.

Toe-May-Toe, Toe-Mah-Toe. Some site that does tear downs (not iFixit) tore open one of their chips, once, and defecated masonry. They said the chip design was obviously hand-designed, and stood head and shoulders above other ARM architectures.

They have done OK.

Sorry if I offended you. None was meant. I’ll edit that out.

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

#749

Post by danudey »

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.

Linus Tech Tips recently published a video where they did all kinds of cooling hacks to a Macbook Air, including milling out the CPU heat sink, adding thermal pads to dissipate heat into the chassis (instead of insulating the chassis from the heat), and using a water block to cool the chassis with ice water.

They got pretty dramatic results from the first few options, but it topped out at the thermal pads and nothing else made any difference at all. Their conclusion was that the way the system was built, there was an upper limit on the power the system could consistently provide to the CPU, and no amount of cooling would make any difference after that point.

The obvious conclusion for me was that Apple made decisions based on battery life and worked backwards from there, choosing a chip that fell within the desired range, designing a cooling system that was good enough for that ballpark, and providing just enough power to the CPU/GPU package to hit the upper end of the range.

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