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

theverge.com

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

#881

Post by greggman3 »

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…

I don't know about MBP but the iPad Pro has a faster GPU than an MBA for most of the shaders on Shadertoy.com

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

#882

Post by rock_artist »

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…

> Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships;

Well we've already seen things gets delayed and even canceled (AirPower).

Cook's Apple is more about supply chain (where he excels), so if indeed the silicon design works, they would be able to 'ship'.

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

#883

Post by fireattack »

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-_-... ).

I'm surprised that Windows has ~50%.

I'm not a developer myself, but When I engaging with them on various OSS projects I always feel Windows is being treated as a second class citizen in almost every aspect (smaller projects often has no test, tool chain setup, tutorial, or all of above for Windows, as a starter).

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

#885

Post by tdsamardzhiev »

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…

Not a fan of Apple, but x86 is a mess and I'd love to see companies pushing for its replacement.

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

#886

Post by kccqzy »

cestith wrote: post #377
joakleaf wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty much the same with PowerPC to Intel... Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance. There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case. In a lot of ways, this is far mor…

That wasn't their first processor change, either. Not even was it first in the Mac line. The Apple I and II were MOS 6502 machines except for the Apple IIgs which was a 65c816. Then the early Macs were 680x0 machines. Then PowerPC. Then Intel. They looked at Intel chips for the iPhone and settled on Arm before launch. I wouldn't be surprised if some very brittle, early development version of iOS was running on an Int…

Not only that, there were also early versions of iOS compiled for PowerPC, for running inside the iPhone simulator app on PowerPC-based Macs.

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

#887

Post by anoncow »

JohnBooty wrote: post #853
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…

Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators Thank you for mentioning this. I feel like many have missed it. I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage. Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel. Where Apple can re…

This could mean the following things.

1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.

2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently.

3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here, it may mean that the non-Apple ecosystem survives and even thrives. It may even mean that Apple looks at Intel/AMD as an option for Pro MacBooks in the future. However, this does seem a little less likely.

4. This could also herald the entry of Qualcomm and the likes into laptop territory.

Looks like a very interesting and possibly industry changing move. This could potentially severely affect Intel/AMD and Microsoft. And all these players will have to play this new scenario very carefully.

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

#889

Post by tgv »

jmmcd wrote: post #609
tgv wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Logic isn't worth much without plugins A lot of people do say that, including a lot of professionals, but in my opinion Logic with its stock plugins is already absolutely great. Some people buy a lot of plugins because they don't know how to use the builtin plugins, and some because they enjoy playing with new stuff more than making music (and yes, some who know what they're doing too).

Some of the built-in stuff is quite good, but there's a whole lot missing. For me, it would be the sample players (Kontakt, Play, SINE, ARIA, and whatever Spitfire's sample player is called), Pianoteq, spatialization, reverbs, some of the outlandish plugins, iZotope's stuff, a PSP equalizer, and a few synths. I know other people use a wider range of plugins, and they depend on them in their workflow. They are quite likely to bail to Cubase on Windows if their plugins don't get ported.

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

#890

Post by anoncow »

Reminds me of a recent LTT video where Linus suspected that the reason Apple was severely under utilising Intel CPUs on their Macs by having poor thermals could be because they wanted to release their own silicon for future Macs and have them compare favourably against previous Intel based Macs.
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