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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

#811

Post by bobdole12345 »

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…

You know that Apple is going to be making the GPU with the same technology as the CPU right?

And those accelerators don't need to be discrete, Apple can add them to their CPUs.

So, it looks like your point is: Sure, Apple is going to jump a couple process nodes from where Intel is, but everything is somehow going to remain the same?

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

#812

Post by m463 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #726
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.

> I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers. Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less. Shareholders benefit from i…

Have you looked at the price of non-apple laptops over the years?

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

#813

Post by Veedrac »

fock wrote: post #572
eanzenberg wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have a mobile chip that is as fast as an active-thermally cooled notebook chip.

so could you provide some actual, open-source basic benchmarks. And not strange, opaque geekbench results... I guess AMD is fine for me (as is my old Intel-notebook) and I'll just wait for POVray, GROMACS and Co. EDIT: And well, I noticed, supposedly Anandtech ran SPECint2006 on the A13 (and numerous other chips) - they ran it with WSL for x86 (because running on a dozen Android things is easier than running a standa…

The official results from spec.org have a bunch of cheating, eg. exploiting undefined behaviour to run a benchmark improperly. AnandTech uses a consistent compiler (Clang, not ICC) without settings to exploit this, hence the divergence.

Andrei mentions this here: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=187314&curpost...

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

#814

Post by cmrdporcupine »

The real story here, I think, is that Apple is making moves to end the bifurcation of their product line. Having the same ISA in both lines means eventually we'll see the lines between them blur.

Whether that's good for consumers remains to be seen -- I fear it may lead to Macs whose architecture is locked down in a manner similar to iOS devices. That would be a worrying trend.

It's amazing that in their history of making computers Apple has used the 6502/65816, the 68k series, the PowerPC, and now ARM. And along the way there were backwards compatibility options for all of them (although not many people bought and used the Apple II compatibility cards for the Mac, they were really two separate user bases).

It is kind of satisfying in a way to see the ARM architecture come full circle and back to the 'home computer' segment it started in. I look forward to seeing someone port RISC-OS to a Mac, I'm sure it will happen. :-)

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

#815

Post by m463 »

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.

But customers are going towards an entirely entirely closed everything. ios is apple languages, apple signature required to run code, apple processors. Desktop machines are the last bit of freedom in the apple ecosystem.

This isn't "sort-of-ok", it's "bad-for-customers" and "bad-for-developers".

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

#816

Post by raydev »

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…

> most energy is going into display and GPU

You know Apple Silicon is going to handle this too, right?

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

#817

Post by steveklabnik »

sroussey wrote: post #802
steveklabnik wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Sounds like this will cost Mozilla some time and money, but they will have to support it.

I’m not sure why. As I said, they’ve been using Rust on ARM (as part of Firefox) for a long time; I’m not aware of them being unsatisfied with the current state.

I expect that the Rust project will end up benefiting from the extra interest though, and improving on the things above.

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

#818

Post by 013a »

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…

They said "we expect the transition to take two years [...] we've still got some Intel Macs to show you soon [sic] [roughly what they said]" during the keynote.

This isn't just going to replace low-end machines; its every machine they sell, within two years. Probably starting with low-end, but moving up.

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

#819

Post by gsnedders »

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.

Is their multi-core performance poor, or have they just made size/power trade-offs against increasing the number of cores? The iPad Pro SoCs are literally the only parts they've made so far with four big cores.

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

#820

Post by 01100011 »

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…

AFAIK, they're going to make their own GPU. A recruiter from Apple reached out to me a few weeks ago trying to poach me from my job at a large GPU manufacturer.
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