Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

961–970 of 1001 posts

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

#961

Post by imtringued »

jrobn wrote: post #871
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…

I don't want to repeat myself so I'll just link to my previous comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23612245

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

#962

Post by imtringued »

skohan wrote: post #891
tdsamardzhiev wrote: post #885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the issue with x86? Genuinely asking

It's compatible with all the software I own. Using proton is already a hassle. Adding emulation will just make it worse.

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

#963

Post by imtringued »

looping__lui wrote: post #917
colejohnson66 wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash” Did you miss the part where there’s going to be a “Rosetta 2” AOT/JIT translation layer?

You are aware that you will (most likely) lose all those pretty amazing optimisations that you tend to rely on if you develop software that is a bit more “sophisticated” (e.g., parallel programming leveraging IPP etc.). Can’t wait to see how fast that translation layer will be for my FFTs that have been super optimised for Intel chips. I wonder: when I observed 20+% performance loss for high compute intensive scienti…

I mostly worry about software that will never receive an update. I'm sure the tools you listed will be ported over to ARM simply because it means vendors can sell them again to the same customer.

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

#964

Post by hn_check »

imtringued wrote: post #957
hn_check wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you quote magical as if someone said that. Further, your point is that Apple chips are faster because of easily replicated reasons. Intel is charging hundreds of dollars for their chip -- you should charge them some consulting fees and tell them how easy this is to boost their performance! This isn't even considering that your whole analysis is flawed to begin with and you're comparing apples and oranges.

I think you misunderstood the comment. Intel CPUs are already performing well and it is Apple that is using the same strategy to reach Intel level performance (or even go slightly above it). What you missed is the fact that other SoC vendors like Qualcomm don't follow this strategy and therefore end up with cheaper but also lower performance SoCs. Since Intel doesn't manufacture ARM chips, you are now forced to go wi…

The comment was very literal in comparing the cache on the Apple chip to the Intel chip.

And just to be clear, cache is "expensive" in die size. They aren't putting an order in for L2 cache to Samsung or something.

That Apple chip has a die size less than half the size of Intel chips than it outperforms. So the whole "expensive" claim is debunked before it even gets started.

Further we are very explicitly comparing Apple silicon to Intel because that is exactly the transition that's happening here.

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

#966

Post by ancientknight »

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…

> CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gains

I don't agree. Simply disabling Turbo Boost on MBP16 nets me around 10-15% more battery life. Underclocking a CPU can even result in twice to thrice the battery life on a gaming laptop under same workload.

Here's more details. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/304884-disabling-intel...

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

#967

Post by michelb »

mantap wrote: post #947
michelb wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Not much. If you bought that machine you didn't care about it much as you bought older hardware at a premium price-point. You bought it to use it right now without fussing and have accepted it's obsolescence in 2-4 years, as is quite normal for studios. If you bought it as an IT enthousiast, well..why would you even do th…

The Mac Pro was seen as an an assurance that Apple was going to support their Pro customers for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Mac Pro itself. It's the software and supporting hardware. Also crucially, due to Apple's spat with NVIDIA, the Mac Pro doesn't support CUDA. This means software has to be modified to use Metal Compute to support the Mac Pro. If you make pro software Apple just let off a huge signa…

The Mac Pro serves such a tiny, tiny sliver of the pro market, I don't know if they got played. I mean, the big audio/editing/GFX studios that bought a Mac Pro will keep using them for years or swap to Windows if no powerful ARM Mac comes out. All the important pro software supports Metal by now.

Anything that isn't a Hollywood studio will have to use an ARM iMac.

Enthousiasts and semi-pro's that want a powerful, affordable and extensible Mac with state of the art discrete GPU's can probably get lost, as is the case right now.

Then again, Apple is now only bound by their own operations, so who knows what they have planned.

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

#968

Post by ancientknight »

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…

> 2. 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.

Nintendo Switch uses a nvidia gpu with a very slow and outdated arm processor. Yet, this allows it to run Rocket League, Witcher 3 etc.

Apple, might go with discrete GPU from nvidia/amd to pair it with their arm processors.

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

#969

Post by imtringued »

mantap wrote: post #947
michelb wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Not much. If you bought that machine you didn't care about it much as you bought older hardware at a premium price-point. You bought it to use it right now without fussing and have accepted it's obsolescence in 2-4 years, as is quite normal for studios. If you bought it as an IT enthousiast, well..why would you even do th…

The Mac Pro was seen as an an assurance that Apple was going to support their Pro customers for the foreseeable future. It's not just the Mac Pro itself. It's the software and supporting hardware. Also crucially, due to Apple's spat with NVIDIA, the Mac Pro doesn't support CUDA. This means software has to be modified to use Metal Compute to support the Mac Pro. If you make pro software Apple just let off a huge signa…

How did they get played hard? They got the latest model that is still supported by lots of software. The only way you get shafted is by buying the ARM Mac Pro which is something the owners of a x86 Mac Pro luckily avoided.

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

#970

Post by danlugo92 »

nojito wrote: post #575
zelly wrote: post #491

It amazes me how much abuse loyal Apple customers are willing to take. How much money are you willing to spend. It's almost like this is some large-scale ritual hazing which serves to make you, the hazee, come out even more loyal on the other side.

Macs are cheaper than PCs and have longer support.

They're also the best laptops around
Post reply on HN