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Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

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Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#921

Post by readittwice »

Someone wrote: post #556
throwaway2048 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

emulating x86 on ARM with any kind of real preformanceis additionally tricky because the x86 archetechure has very strong memory gaurentees (dosent matter if memory is aligned, dosent matter when in the instruction pipeline you access it, etc) that ARM isnt even close to matching. Emulating that requires a massive performance hit, because you essentially have to check every single memory access to make sure its not d…

…or you design your own ARM CPU that handles unaligned memory accesses fine, and run your emulator on that hardware.

AFAIK the ARM license doesn't allow to invent arbitrary extensions to the ISA. So this might not be allowed.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#922

Post by kalleboo »

walshemj wrote: post #588
sreque wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that the greatest minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. However, I feel like the greatest minds of our generation are spent trying to figure out how to enable people to build Linux software on OSX. Whether it is: * a convoluted process involving Vagrant, Docker, or both, because you depend on one or more pieces of software that don't run at all on OSX, including D…

You always ought to build on the same hardware you deploy on - to be blunt having multiple developers messing around on n different macs is just madness!

I don't even know what hardware I'm deploying on. Amazon/Google/Azure has abstracted that away from me.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#923

Post by ximeng »

hvidgaard wrote: post #852
mcny wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfaction rate among surface owners is abysmal. At this point, I'd call the surface brand a failed experiment.

The first year was a really bad. Plain and simple. Now it is a decent device, but I'd take a Lenovo today if I had to make the choice. However, for note taking, the Surface Pro is second to none. The form factor, pen, and OneNote is a really good combo.

Until the screen breaks and you can’t turn it on...

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#924

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Stranger43 wrote: post #213

Have anyone checked with adobe and autodesk if this essentially kills the professional mac workstation as a viable product going forward? I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photosho…

Why assume this is an arch switch to ARM? What's stopping Apple from making an x86-64 compatible chip? Or even a chip with dual instruction sets? I'm sure they have the in-house talent at this point to make it happen.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#925

Post by gargravarr »

stiGGG wrote: post #496
deathanatos wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last couple of jobs have given me no choice aside from a MBP and OS X. They do this because they don't want to manage multiple kinds of machines from an IT perspective. (I'm not sure I agree with this, but it is what it is.) Depending on how widespread this is, usage may not reflect actual user desire (though I would wager quite a large number of users either don't care what they're using, or care, but a MBP is ad…

In my second to last company (a web development shop), they had originally the policy that a new developers can choose if he want either a mac, linux or windows machine. When i arrived there it was 75% mac and the rest used linux, not even one had made the choice for windows. After a while some new guys get hired and one of them wanted to use windows. We found out immediately, that this caused a lot of problems, beca…

We run a Mac and Linux setup here - me being the admin, this is tolerable. Mac's still-essentially-Unix underlying OS makes this reasonably consistent - I can SSH between either platform fairly easily, for example. We offer new starters the option, and are about 50/50, though I've had a few surprises - one user had only previously used Windows, and from experience these sort of users switch to Mac more easily than Ubuntu, but he gave his MBP back after a day and switched to Ubuntu instead, which he's stuck with. I could not be more proud :D

It's very nice to give end users the option - when I joined, I asked for Linux and was given a brand-new Dell XPS with Ubuntu pre-installed, root access, and told, customise it to suit you. I keep that spirit with my users.

Throwing Windows into such a setup is a nightmare though - two users actually installed their company laptops with their own personal Windows 10 licenses without my knowledge or approval - I still hold a grudge because I had to actually read the MS EULA to make sure they weren't about to cause trouble! It means I can't manage them (I have no real tools to do so on Ubuntu), so they're on their own for that. Fortunately management has my back, declaring the company to be a *nix shop.

Our actual product is all containerised so it should run anywhere.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#926

Post by sannee »

nunez wrote: post #805
stiGGG wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my second to last company (a web development shop), they had originally the policy that a new developers can choose if he want either a mac, linux or windows machine. When i arrived there it was 75% mac and the rest used linux, not even one had made the choice for windows. After a while some new guys get hired and one of them wanted to use windows. We found out immediately, that this caused a lot of problems, beca…

I would have been pretty upset with that. Unless you're writing machine-native code, development environments should work on anything, especially if they run on VMs deployed by Vagrant.

You would think that right? Except then you actually want to run a simple python script on Windows and observe things like: os.rename not being able to replace opened files, the default encoding not being UTF-8 (wtf), not being able to just `pip install scipy` because of some weird BLAS/MKL dependency...

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#927

Post by mlloyd »

astrodust wrote: post #537
mlloyd wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the amount of evidence you presented, how could anyone refute your opinion? OP raised a valid argument - Apple's QC has been crap lately and trending downwards. There's a lot of feedback out on the net to support that line of thinking.

Software, you could make a case, that's been a bit of a mess lately. Hardware, though, you've got nothing. Where have they dropped the ball on their chips?

It's all one company. The reputation, stellar or tarnished, affects the entire brand. Their software QC has been bad lately, it's makes me question their hardware QC too. Those bugs/issues are often harder to find though - if they exist - they might not. But I think it's fair for me to question.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#928

Post by bayindirh »

sreque wrote: post #433
mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

This might just be a bargaining move on Apple’s part, but I don’t think so. I think that long term they are much better off controlling their entire hardware stack. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see them make their own display screens. As an Apple customer, I like this idea also. For 20 years, I used to be a desktop Linux fanatic and later became a fan of Android. In the last few years, I have switched to using all…

I am a software developer, and I detest working on my mac laptop. At $lastjob I had a Linux desktop and it is, I believe, the most productive environment I have ever developed in. The job before, I had a windows desktop, and I prefer that to mac. You say you want to just "get things done expediently," but in my experience apple software is flat out inferior and OSX is the worst of the 3 major operating systems I have…

I'm also a software developer and I also have a Linux/Mac mixed environment, and I feel no difference between the two.

To be honest, Mac does many things really differently. Yes it feels and sounds like double-think, but I do everything differently from my Linux desktop, and I can do the same things at the same speed, if not faster.

On the average, I use them equally, and can do the same thing on both.

One footnote is, I do not install anything via homebrew or anything massive which installs into depth of the macOS. For these stuff I have a Linux VM, which is fired up rarely.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#929

Post by valuearb »

nunez wrote: post #807
npunt wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2/3s of all PR activity on Github is on a Mac, for what it's worth. Certainly the platform punches above its weight relative to market share. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/102/?time=2...

I don't trust that for two reasons: 1) There is a lot of cargo-culting around the MacBook because hurr durr Windows is terribad (though, to be fair, Docker does work better natively with OS X than Windows, even under WSL), and 2) Most companies give their developers the choice of a MacBook or the shittiest Windows machines known to man (because of irresistable volume deals from Windows OEMs). I bet the spread would b…

When I asked for a newer MBP, i got bitched out by the purchasing director. He made the point that I was one of only a handful of people in a 500 person IS department allowed to have a Mac.

Many companies don’t allow mac purchases, even for developers.

Re: Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

#930

Post by OnMyPhone »

jmull wrote: post #500
OnMyPhone wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been out of the edu game for a while now. I want to say it was the Map Testing system. The school district was using a web based system (something lightning? I can't remember) previously, but the state was mandating the use of MAP instead. The state didn't give the schools any options or much time to prepare for it either. The school district had 70+ schools. I spent a summer fixing / getting that stuff working.…

Oh good, it wasn't mine! Edit: maybe I should explain a little. We were a educational software developer and doing multimedia titles. We had a home grown multimedia engine which served us well (at the time there weren't alternatives) but Flash came along and at the time they would license the engine as a C or C++ library, which we could embed. This would get us a capable engine with superb integration with the conten…

phew, I was hoping MAP wasn't going to come back to haunt me after all these years, haha.

If your application let students finish what they were doing without randomly crashing and losing everything, then it is leaps and bounds better than the MAP system.

The school had to extend the map testing by 2 weeks just because of how often it crashed and students had to retake it. My coworkers at other school districts in other states ran into the same exact issues. Then on Windows, it had to access a SMB share somewhere to dump data to a flat db... that would get corrupted sometimes when a students application froze up... haha. it was job security though.

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