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Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

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Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#751

Post by imtringued »

iagooar wrote: post #321
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes were all to more powerful processors such that emulating the old architecture wouldn't be that bad. In this instance, Apple would likely be going to a less powerful processors and thus emulation at any reasonable level of performance wouldn't be that viable.

ARM less powerful? Wait and see what Apple can do with their own ARM-design if they target Desktops / Laptops. We might get to see 32 or even 64 cores in a regular MBP. Now tell me how THAT would be less powerful than the current Intel offering.

Let's be realistic. 64 A72 or A11 cores is a pipe dream. It's not going to happen without a massive nm process advantage.

If we had a MBP with 64 wimpy a53 cores it would still only have 50% of the performance of a Intel i7 8700k or AMD Ryzen 1800X on paper. Of course that is faster than most notebooks but if you truly care about CPU performance then you usually wouldn't use a notebook in the first place.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#752

Post by foobarian »

Myrmornis wrote: post #505
sreque wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that the greatest minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. However, I feel like the greatest minds of our generation are spent trying to figure out how to enable people to build Linux software on OSX. Whether it is: * a convoluted process involving Vagrant, Docker, or both, because you depend on one or more pieces of software that don't run at all on OSX, including D…

I did maintain a Linux laptop (Ubuntu) for all my personal and development usage, from 2003-2011. Based on my experience at that time, it is entirely incorrect to claim that the experience with device drivers (wifi, bluetooth) and sleep/suspend/hibernate is better on Linux. Those things basically never worked right, battery experience was terrible, and many times during that era I lost a day's work because something…

I begrudgingly use a MBP now after many years dealing with similar issues on Linux. The hardware is great, things adjacent to hardware are great (drivers, external monitors, configuration) but I would prefer to have the windowing system behave more like Gnome. Things like Alt+click to drag a window, Alt-Tab cycling through windows not apps (and stick to the same desktop workspace at that) menu bar location etc.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#753

Post by imtringued »

wilun wrote: post #345
Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

There are several aspect to the perf hypotheses you make, and I don't see why Apple could not design its own CPU with excellent perfs. Current Apple best CPUs are already performing very well compared to some Intel CPU. Not the fastest Intel CPU, obviously, but a) Apple Arm implementation is already above all the Arm competitors b) we are talking about an Arm implementation optimized for low energy consumption and ot…

>Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side.

Meanwhile in reality the top end non apple ARM SoCs only have the performance of a single highend intel core.

http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ vs http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#754

Post by deagle50 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #235
deagle50 wrote: post #134

About time. I'm tired of Intel's minimally viable laptop processors (and their security blunders). Apple has the margins and the volume to throw a lot of transistors at a problem, like they do in iOS devices. I want 13" Macbook with more than 2 cores, good GPU, and decent memory bandwidth. Apple can do big/little cores, large caches, wider memory buses (HBM please), inference acceleration, 120hz variable refresh with…

These things are available, Apple chooses not to use them in their quest for thinness.

I disagree. They have certainly sacrificed battery size at the altar of thinness but not transistors. Who else is doing 100mm^2 SoCs in consumer devices? Now take that up to 200-300mm^2 and imagine the possibilities with tailor-made blocks and cutting edge memory. Look at Intel's dual core die shots, >50% GPU and my laptop is still jankier than my iOS device.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#755

Post by tim- »

kevindong wrote: post #744
israrkhan wrote: post #81

Apple has been preparing itself for independence from underlying CPU arachitecture for a while. In WWDC 2015[1], they announced bitcode. All App submissions to AppStore are compiled to to bitcode. This allows Apple to re-optimize/re-compile your app binary in the future for newer hardware without the need to submit new version of your app to the store. This allows Apple to switch to intel chip on iPhone, or switch to…

I just checked the app store on my Mac. I have just 1 application installed from the app store: Xcode. Even then that's just because Apple makes me have it installed to have command line tools such as git. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of applications (Microsoft Office, games, browsers, text editors, IDEs, etc.) installed on Macs are sourced from places other than the app store.

You can get the command line tools without installing Xcode from the App Store by running the command: xcode-select --install

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#757

Post by organsnyder »

ploggingdev wrote: post #745
powvans wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree with you more. Ubuntu was my daily driver from the start of 2007 through early 2014 when I finally gave in and bought a rMBP. Despite missing the "real" nix environment being available right under the GUI, I have been much much happier on the Mac. I fought software update and driver issues for years. I ran the most bog standard HP laptops that I could get, albeit w/ Nvidia GPUs. Every distribution upgr…

> I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can. What makes you think everyone faces the same issues as you? Maybe the problem is your specific hardware? I've been running linux based distros as my daily driver for over 10 years and literally never had any of the issues you described. Never had issues w…

I just bought a Thinkpad T480 to replace my aging (but still functional) T410. I installed Debian (using the nonfree installer to get the wifi firmware), and everything just worked right out of the box.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#758

Post by kevindong »

tim- wrote: post #755
kevindong wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked the app store on my Mac. I have just 1 application installed from the app store: Xcode. Even then that's just because Apple makes me have it installed to have command line tools such as git. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of applications (Microsoft Office, games, browsers, text editors, IDEs, etc.) installed on Macs are sourced from places other than the app store.

You can get the command line tools without installing Xcode from the App Store by running the command: xcode-select --install

Well, there goes the only App Store application then.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#759

Post by khedoros1 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #599
nqzero wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for laptops, dell seems to love 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes them inappropriate for development. for workstations, every dell i've seen uses custom cases that prevent upgrading the motherboard with an OTS component

>>for laptops, dell seems to love 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes them inappropriate for development. Inappropriate how, exactly?

How about "suboptimal"? 16:9 is OK for games and great for movies, and 1080p is at least wide enough that it can be reasonable to stick 2 terminals side-by-side, but it would be even better if it was a little taller.
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