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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

#91

Post by pcwalton »

wmf wrote: post #82
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.

> Historically, almost all attempts to replace an enormously successful product line with something incompatible have failed.

Except AArch64, which has a legacy 32 bit mode for compatibility but is otherwise a totally separate ISA, unlike x86-64 and i386.

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

#92

Post by protomyth »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #65
drewkett wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the licensing deal would terminate if AMD is sold

You're correct. Here's AMD's statement: >Advanced Micro Devices has clarified terms of the cross-license agreement with Intel Corp. on Thursday. As it appears, if either AMD or Intel change their control (i.e., gets acquired), the cross-license agreement between the two companies is automatically terminated for both parties. Since AMD invented x64 this would leave Intel in quite a bind and the only solution would be…

Yeah, that would be a really, really dangerous agreement for Intel given the market cap of AMD and how it would gut Intel's CPU lineup. I would assume their would be one damn quick agreement after the fact.

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

#93

Post by DannyBee »

msbarnett wrote: post #41
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.

IIRC AMD's cross-licensing deals with Intel over certain key patents are null and void if AMD is bought, which puts a real damper on the main reason anyone would consider purchasing the company.

You do realize that amd owns a lot of the x64 patents, not intel, right?

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

#94

Post by wmf »

runjake wrote: post #87
5ilv3r wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atom hasn't been discontinued; low-end "Celeron" and "Pentium" chips are actually Atoms.

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

#95

Post by mschuster91 »

lightedman wrote: post #63
msbarnett wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC AMD's cross-licensing deals with Intel over certain key patents are null and void if AMD is bought, which puts a real damper on the main reason anyone would consider purchasing the company.

Please. I buy AMD then Intel loses the 64 licensing rights which AMD owns. That really sounds like a winning proposition for Apple, given that Intel's own 64-bit arches historically sucked.

> That really sounds like a winning proposition for Apple, given that Intel's own 64-bit arches historically sucked.

Yeah but for various reasons any usable amd64 CPU needs backwards compatibility with x86 - which, if Apple doesn't want to go the Fat Binary emulation approach again, requires that an Apple-bought AMD must achieve a licensing deal with Intel to maintain said compatibility.

Then again, Apple these days doesn't give a ... about BC anymore anyway, so they might as well go down that track and use only amd64.

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

#96

Post by syncsynchalt »

abalone wrote: post #85
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 d…

Bitcode allows you to optimize between chip versions with different opcodes, but not different architectures, word sizes, or endianness.

Source: the recent Accidental Tech Podcast that interviewed Chris Lattner.

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

#97

Post by nordsieck »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #79
mortenjorck wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Divestment is an oversimplification of the direction Apple seems to be taking the Mac. Consolidation would be a better term: trying to prune the product line into a lineup of hits and nothing else, often to the exclusion of non-mainstream (professional) users. So the test to apply is: will this enable a headline feature? In this case, if it lets Apple put a significantly bigger battery life number on the product page…

I mean, I'm not a fan of the new MBP myself, but I don't think they're ignoring professional users. Didn't their MBP sales go UP?

"often to the exclusion of non-mainstream (professional) users"

The allusion is to the Mac Pro, not the Macbook Pro.

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

#98

Post by facepalm »

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…

Why can't they keep doing x86 stuff and start something else at the same time?

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

#99

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

MR4D wrote: post #80
plussed_reader wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like they've been doing this to osX, starting with 10.9 it seems like a lot of the visual flair of iOS has filtered into the macOS environment. I fear that this will dumb it down too much for the power users, and conversely over-complicate it for the average iOS user. I'd love to be wrong...

Yes, but this is not specifically what I'm talking about. Think of something like MS Outlook - it's a big, complex app with lots of features. Now imagine that you only write the app once, but design two interfaces for it - one set for the Mac, and the other for the iPad. You compile through XCode, and upload to the App store. Apple notes that their are interfaces for both iPad and Mac, and posts it in both app stores…

One basic problem - macOS has many, many more features than iOS.

There would be a lot more involved than redesigning the UI. The two platforms have fundamentally different class trees all the way from the view and user event classes down to core OS hooks.

There's some limited overlap, but not as much as you might expect.

Merging the two platforms and creating a UI-level split wouldn't be impossible, but it would be a huge job and would effectively mean a rewrite of both OSs - and probably of WatchOS and TvOS too.

It's not obvious this would be a good thing to do. MS tried it, and that was pretty much a disaster.

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

#100

Post by foobiekr »

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…

Why does intel need to do this?

x86 decode is a tiny, tiny part of the overhead of modern x86 CPUs. Architecture for the most part at this point doesn't matter unless you are talking about truly novel approaches like the Mill. Arm certainly is not a significant improvement.

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