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Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

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Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#81

Post by erik »

MekaiGS wrote: post #40
bitmapbrother wrote: post #28

Apple should just buy AMD. It would only cost them about 15 Billion or so and they would get an x86 license. If they really want to control their own destiny this would be the way to go.

From my understanding the x86 license is not transferable upon purchase.

I wonder about the other x86 licenses that have been out there in the past. Via still offers x86 apparently. It looks like Cyrix ended up with Texas Instruments. Transmeta looks messy. IBM used to make x86 chips as well.

And I wonder if any of this relevant to making modern x64 compatible cpus?

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#82

Post by wmf »

lend000 wrote: post #66

It's finally happening! The increase in competition in both the foundry and architectural spaces is exactly what we need to push us past this stagnation of Moore's Law. Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture. There are huge parts of their processor designs that no one at the company modifies (or even understands) from one generation to the next, but which they cannot remove for backward…

Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture.

The last time Intel did this it was called Itanium and it was horrible. Historically, almost all attempts to replace an enormously successful product line with something incompatible have failed.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#83

Post by r00fus »

wmf wrote: post #58
r00fus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so? A Mac is a very high ASP item - why not, for example allow iOS apps to run in macOS (using the ARM processor). Ultimately, the 2016 MBPs are a great example of why Apple needs to divest from Intel. The poor timing for Kaby Lake mobile processors and lack of low-power RAM were both Apple's reasons stated when the topic of "the MBP isn't keeping up with the competition" arises. And who's to say that macOS.next…

why not, for example allow iOS apps to run in macOS That's not what the article is talking about and it's a bad idea for UX reasons (no touchscreen). And who's to say that macOS.next will be anything similar to the current macOS? Don't even go there; a vocal minority of Mac users including me do not want anything like that. And getting back to the article, if the OS is radically different then presumably it doesn't n…

> Don't even go there; a vocal minority of Mac users including me do not want anything like that.

I'm a Mac user too. Unfortunately, Apple is notorious for doing what they think is right, regardless of their user base. Need I say "lightning headphones" or "no magsafe, just USB-C"?

Both of these strike me as positioning for the future Apple wants despite the concerns the vocal parts of their userbase.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#84

Post by lend000 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #73
lend000 wrote: post #66

It's finally happening! The increase in competition in both the foundry and architectural spaces is exactly what we need to push us past this stagnation of Moore's Law. Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture. There are huge parts of their processor designs that no one at the company modifies (or even understands) from one generation to the next, but which they cannot remove for backward…

> It's time to start fresh with a new architecture if they want to maintain their reputation of having the most powerful technology. They tried that, though. It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. Now, Itanium had all kinds of other problems and I wouldn't call its failure incontrovertible evidence against "Intel should make a new architecture", but I can understand why the company isn't eager to try that again.…

> It was called Itanium and it went nowhere.

It was popular in its intended niche (HPC) for a while, but the value proposition was not sufficient. It dropped some x86 baggage but it didn't add anything fundamentally superior on top of it -- the ILP could easily be attained by having more cores on x86. To be honest I actually really like what they did with Itanium, but it wasn't a good enough innovation to break off the family line of backwards compatibility.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#85

Post by abalone »

MR4D wrote: post #70

This has been rumored for some time. I believe it's true, but then again, Apple kills off most projects before they see the light of day. Whether this ever makes it to consumers is the important question. That being said, I've seen a number of comments about running iOS apps on Macs, or "convertible" Macs/iPads, and so on. I think those are off base given the supposed purity that Apple always talks about. However, th…

> However, there is one thing I've never seen mentioned - a combined Mac/iOS binary.

Because they're already doing something better. All iOS apps compile to Bitcode, an intermediary representation that can then compile an optimized binary for the target device architecture.[1]

So if there ever were a desire to run iOS apps on Mac, they'd just compile from Bitcode. Having said that, there's explicitly zero desire to do this.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/ID...

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#86

Post by 5ilv3r »

throw2016 wrote: post #62

I think the problem is while ARM is good at lower power the moment you need sustained performance the power requirements shoot up and throttling begins. The flagship ARM A72 and A73 are not adequate for true desktop class performance, somewhat catching up to Intel's low end core u laptop chips. It's increasingly looking like to get x86 level performance ARM would lose its low power advantages. The AMD Zen on the othe…

Oddly, ARM is eating the PC architecture from the inside. What's on your raid card? An arm. What's in your usb devices? An arm. What's in your SSD? An arm. A PC is beginning to look like a network of arms with an intel driving. How long will the intel core last?

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#87

Post by runjake »

5ilv3r wrote: post #77
sorenjan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't Intel include an Atom core on their CPUs as a next level speed step, like ARMs big.little? It has to be much easier to keep both the high and low power parts the same architecture.

That would probably be less power efficient than just running a single core alone at reduced clock.

Which is why the Atom was discontinued, IIRC: the mainline chips power efficiency had been reduced enough to make the Atom much less viable.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#88

Post by protomyth »

astrodust wrote: post #59
pvg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was actually their product rather than a 'hedge' for a while.

It started out as a hedge against their own hardware being an impediment to sales, then ended up being their entire business. I guess it was a good hedge to have!

Considering they had NeXTSTEP release versions running on x86, PA-RISC, SPARC, and its original home 68000, they did pretty well. I do wonder why the MIPS chips were ignored.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#89

Post by pcwalton »

Analemma_ wrote: post #73
lend000 wrote: post #66

It's finally happening! The increase in competition in both the foundry and architectural spaces is exactly what we need to push us past this stagnation of Moore's Law. Intel needs to sacrifice Microsoft and make x86 a legacy architecture. There are huge parts of their processor designs that no one at the company modifies (or even understands) from one generation to the next, but which they cannot remove for backward…

> It's time to start fresh with a new architecture if they want to maintain their reputation of having the most powerful technology. They tried that, though. It was called Itanium and it went nowhere. Now, Itanium had all kinds of other problems and I wouldn't call its failure incontrovertible evidence against "Intel should make a new architecture", but I can understand why the company isn't eager to try that again.…

Look at what ARM did with AArch64 though: it's backwards compatible via mode switching but is otherwise a fairly clean break at the ISA level.

AMD probably could have done something similar. They just didn't, likely out of risk aversion.

Re: Apple Said to Work on Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role

#90

Post by ams6110 »

astrodust wrote: post #17
alrs wrote: post #13

There's always a hedge afoot. Apple had OS 7 running on Intel as early as 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

NeXT had an Intel version as a hedge as well. Seems those two projects were destined to merge together.

Not just Intel but PA-RISC and Sparc as well, in addition to M68K.
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