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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

#871

Post by jrobn »

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…

The main thing Apple has done to improve their A-series chips has been massive L2 caches.

I still major advantages of putting a A-series chip into a MacBook Pro.

1) There will be a much larger thermal and power draw envelope available to new A-series chip. I suspect we will see insane “boosting” clock speeds.

2) Incredible “at idle” performance well beyond what X86 can provide with on did GPU cores, which means a bit better battery life for that screen.

3) More opportunity for tightly integrated acceleration chips On die for codec, ML, and other hardware acceleration methods for Apple only software libraries.

4) Easy porting between iOS and macOS, and tvOS.

#3 will be the most significant.

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

#872

Post by monocasa »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #638
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…

Why do feel that Rust is behind on ARM? I can't comment on the performance, but everything that I used that was purely written in Rust compiled and ran perfectly on my PineBook Pro. (with the exception of alacritty, but that's because PBP doesn't support OpenGL 3.x) Go does have the (platform) advantage (?) of preferring the "rewrite everything in Go" approach, so those just transition when the tooling supports a new…

I've been working on an OS in Rust that has an aarch64 port, and I've for sure seen some... questionable output. It's all been valid code for the input, but not nearly as optimized as I've come to expect out of LLVM based compilers. I'm sure there's some low hanging fruit that needs attention is all.

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

#873

Post by mattigames »

acrooks wrote: post #732
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'm actually not so sure about this. Apple's gross margin target is in the ballpark of 38-40% and a savings of $200-800 per MBP would have a substantial upwards impact on that gross margin number. Apple carefully sets pricing to achieve a target gross margin without impacting sales too much (higher price = higher gross margin but likely lower net revenue because they're priced out of the market). One of the two scena…

The high price of MacBooks is treated as a status symbol and the marketing department clearly knows as much, so I don't think they will be willing to give that up, so I lean towards your second option.

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

#874

Post by 9fathom »

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…

> One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.

It's in fairly good shape, and has an active community. With the current proliferation of IoT devices, both the kernel and userland are well-maintained, and plenty of distros are available. The kernel also benefits from much of the work done for Android and Chromebooks as well.

All of the usual FOSS software is ported and runs well. As of this moment, you could easily take your pick from any of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, Slack, or Alpine just for starters, plus a whole mess of specialty distros. Many of those offer both 32- and 64-bit ARM versions.

Also bear in mind that recent ARM CPUs do support hardware-assisted virtualization as well. KVM and Xen are both available for ARM today, and I'd be shocked if Apple's Hypervisor.framework doesn't roll out with ARM support in the new macOS version as well.

(I'm writing this from Firefox in Manjaro ARM on a PineBook Pro, that I use as my daily driver)

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

#875

Post by mekster »

tgv wrote: post #439
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…

> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.

> When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard.

Maybe in your segment but I can't think of using Windows as a web developer even without any of the "Pro" app from Apple.

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

#876

Post by ec109685 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #502
StillBored wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD is tiny compared to intel, the fact that they are besting them goes to show how they have been stuck for ~5 years. The real problem though, is that apple is actually designing a core 100% focused on the target market. Unlike intel, for whatever reason, and AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops. So, I would expect the engineering tradeoffs for said laptop/desktop proces…

AMD right now has a core 100% focused on low power devices with amazing performance, very likely ahead of Apple. So no, your premise is not accurate.

Why is it very likely ahead of Apple? Apple has been doing the dedicated low power core approach for a while.

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

#877

Post by occamschainsaw »

jl6 wrote: post #537
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…

Here's an analogy to help explain the skepticism: ants have amazing efficiency - they can lift multiples of their own body weight. So why can't an ant lift my car? Well, because it's too small. So let's just take the same ant design and scale it up? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. A creature capable of lifting my car wouldn't be much like an ant. There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become…

Here's a counterexample (stretching your analogy a bit): Ants lifting the heaviest car in the world.

[1]https://www.top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601098

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

#878

Post by billyhoffman »

chx wrote: post #404

I searched this thread for Thunderbolt and USB and nothing. The only way this can work if they implement USB 4. That's earlier than expected but not by much. USB 4 came out last September and everyone was guesstimating 18 months before the first systems ship with it. AMD shipping it with the Ryzen 4xxx laptop chips would've been a really big win but apparently it was too early. And now, as with Thunderbolt, it seems…

You'll notice all the demos of macOS Big Sur were shown using a Pro XDR Display, connected to hardware that was later revealed to be the MacMini+A12Z/Developer Transition Hardware. And during the Maya demo, it was a Pro XDR Display explicitly connected to the Developer hardware.

Which is interesting, because the Pro XDR Display can only be driven TB3 [1].

So Apple figured out the licensing for a TB3 controller chip to work in this design (which funny enough would be licensing that IP from Intel), or they are using USB4/TB4, or something else I'm not smart enough to think of.

1- https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/specs/

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

#879

Post by vonseel »

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…

Re. the PPC era and whether it will be like that in the future, this is from a lowly web backend developers perspective, so I might be naive, but hopefully we've learned to build generic solutions without sacrificing performance, when it comes to things like this, and it doesn't devolve into a code that only runs on X-hardware type thing.

I think it's a more common problem to see things like the T2 security chip not being present on older hardware or hackintosh(unsupported) hardware, so if you're not running the right hardware you can't take advantage of a feature (AR in certain iPhones) or you won't have the performance advantage (Filevault encryption with T2 chips vs encrypted by CPU).

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

#880

Post by greggman3 »

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'm excited. My #1 wish is a 16" MacBook Pro that ways 3 lbs or less. Take an iPad Pro, make it 16" instead of 12, add a keyboard, run MacOS. LG already makes 15.6" intel notebooks that weigh 3 lbs. Apple can do it too!
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