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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

#921

Post by kwanbix »

anoncow wrote: post #887
JohnBooty wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

What are you talking about? Android has about 72% of worldwide market share, so clearly Android phones are not significantly less attractive.

And I am not an Android fanboy, my first two phones were iPhone 1 and iPhone 3GS, and I still consider them very good phones.

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

#922

Post by unicornfinder »

jedberg wrote: post #387
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…

I think some of that stems from the fact that Steve Jobs was saying his own words, but everyone else is saying marketing's words. The best marketing could do to Steve was tell him that he's using a competing's brand name incorrectly. Everything else was his. So he could speak passionately in his own words. Everyone else is acting, but they aren't actors.

Nailed it. With Steve Jobs his own passion and enthusiasm really shone through, whereas now we're seeing a rehearsed, scripted presentation. I don't think they're necessarily wrong to take this route, and I think with Apple's much bigger reach it's probably a fairly wise and safe bet, but it does sadden me a bit that we don't get Steve's showmanship anymore.

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

#923

Post by Xixi »

notSupplied wrote: post #504
paulpan wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity. I think GPU scaling will be much harder than CPU, so whereas Apple can surpass Intel CPUs for all but the highest segments, putting together a standalone GPU will be hard and very interesting to see. For an entry-level GPU? No issues. But what about a…

And what happens if China marches into Taiwan? This is a plausible consideration that must be one of Apple's worst nightmares.

My understanding is that the actual machineries and materials necessary to make and run fabs are made in US, Japan and Europe, not in China or Taiwan. For example photo-lithography machines are made by the like of ASML (Netherlands), Nikon (Japan) and Canon (Japan).

Although it would assuredly take some time to ramp up, TSMC should be able to spawn fabs outside of Taiwan, out of CCP reach. They are already building one in the US, albeit with a small output.

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

#924

Post by thetinguy »

monocasa wrote: post #550
GeekyBear wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that you should take a look at a comparison of the power efficiency of Apple's "little" core in the A13 to a stock ARM little core. >In the face-off against a Cortex-A55 implementation such as on the Snapdragon 855, the new Thunder cores represent a 2.5-3x performance lead while at the same time using less than half the energy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... Apple has been hit…

Yeah, the other ARMs are anemic, but the AMD cores are knocking it out of the park recently.

They’re not really though. Still slower IPC.

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

#925

Post by tomaskafka »

newacct583 wrote: post #342
m12k wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no indication that the A12Z will be the chip that ships to consumers at the end of the year. So honestly it'd be a bit out of character to boast about the specific performance numbers of a pre-release dev kit chip - especially when that chip has already had Geekbench run on it for a while: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-pro-12-9-inch...

> So honestly it'd be a bit out of character This is Apple we're talking about. They boast about unverifiable performance claims in pretty much every product they announce...

But not before they announce it.

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

#926

Post by tomaskafka »

originalvichy wrote: post #291
valuearb wrote: post #32

Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated. Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

I am soo much looking forward to using native Slack and Teams instead of their horrendous electron apps, that even don't use GPU acceleration on iGPU Macbooks!

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

#927

Post by DrBazza »

Interesting to see Big Sur + iOS merging. It's the opposite of what MS attempted in some ways. MS had a completely different look and feel on the phone and tried to shoe-horn it into Windows 8 in one release, whereas Apple have gradually moved things between the desktop and phone in both directions (dock, curved icons, notifications), and gradually aligned the two.

Maybe one more release until they're merged completely.

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

#928

Post by andrewksl »

anoncow wrote: post #890

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.

The same video where he gains ~13% performance by turning the bottom of the laptop into into a heatsink, rendering it a surface too hot to be placed on a lap. Also where chilled-water cooling had no performance gains over the un-lappable laptop.

If anything, he debunked his own theory with that experiment.

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

#929

Post by ant6n »

habitue wrote: post #766
jasonhansel wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x86 is only dead because CISC is dead. Now we just have to wait for Intel to go "full IBM" and try to ban people from writing emulators...

I don't think they can ban emulators without just straight up banning competitors like AMD that make compatible chips. (which presumably they would have done if they could)

Amd64 is twenty years old, patents are expiring.

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

#930

Post by tomaskafka »

billyhoffman wrote: post #878
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 t…

Or they are bullshitting - even if the Dev kit wasn't ready to connect to XDR, they wouldn’t dare to show it. Which monitor would they even show it on? 10 year old Cinema? Glossy plastic Acer? :)
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