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


I wouldn't count on that. The iPhone already runs on modified ARM cores of some description, but hasn't really resulted in a lot of cross-platform ARM code out there. Android to some extent has, but at the same time it rarely results in an open source code drop - sometimes it does though, especially if there's an existent open source project that can be helped out with. I think a lot of the N64 emu plugin improvements came via Android devs for example. Maybe I'm too focussed on emulators and games though - the former isn't really a thing on Apple devices cos you'd need to hack them even to install those things, being banned from their appstore. But everything else I use either depends on a wimp desktop, or a terminal environment - things that don't happen on most phones.
 
Why do you think it is out of the question for Apple to go full ARM in their laptops come 2020?

For what they are worth, the power is good enough, and for how apple is building them, a cheap slot-in design that has nothing replaceable is how they will keep doing it. They put a lot of research into something that is smaller, so they can re-use all of it, software and hardware, on a bigger scale with relative ease. Less setting up production runs, less reliance on others. Apple doesn't sell a lot of laptops now, in what is a declining market.

If chromebooks are the only thing going up, effectively cannibalizing the regular laptop market, it makes sense to do it well rather than sit it out.

I would imagine it to be some multiple of the resolutions they have now, perhaps using every bit of tech they can gut out of their big pro iPads.

Intel processors are extremely expencive for Apple, given what their markup is overall. Double whammy for being big enough to hurt X86 sales even further by removing a fair few percentages from overall sales. X86 sales are tied to Windows, ARM isn't.

All the emulator is about to do is provide free beta-testing, and ramp up demand for apps that work both places. This is how the ipad was made, iphone apps made bigger with crass scaling.

And the scaling isn't good on macOS, leaving old models in the dust. It isn't even a fast or good OS. It is one Apple has neglected with software updates and system security for years.

Why would they keep that around when it is the overpriced small stuff that makes bank?
The sales are going down there too, wrt. Android, and Google Android/ChromeOS doesn't have even what the KDE desktop has in terms of Phone/OS overlap.

A barely functional computer in many form-factors, where Apple runs everything, is as Apple as it gets, expect the retard-meter to be stuck on full.
 
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I think it fits them perfectly. They'll get probably similar CPU power to the current low power Intel cpu offering, much much better GPU power and maybe slightly better power efficiency.

The switch from PowerPC to Intel showed already that they don't value backward compatibility so I don't see what would prevent them from going ARM.

OS wise people seem to assume that ARM = mobile OS but Apple could have them run iOS or MacOS, we just don't know.
 
I don't use apple hardware anymore so I don't really care except apple guides the industry. Android and ios just don't feel like real OSs to me, they are extremely limited. Even hooking a mouse and keyboard to a Android tablet doesn't give me what I want. I want to use a full desktop OS, not a phone tablet OS but I guess that is where things are going in the future, more to the side of simplified OSs that only do so much.

Apple won't kill off osx immediately, even if they use ARM in all their hardware they will still need to keep the artist crowd happy and over time convince them to use ios and stop using a full desktop OS. It is already kinda happening, I have been watching how animators on YouTube are only using the ipad pro with pencil to do 100% of their videos. Before artists were the only ones buying OSX, people that make a living off their computers anyway.
 
second exodous said:
Android and ios just don't feel like real OSs to me, they are extremely limited.
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Absolutely agree. I just can't get excited about new mobile devices. So boring.


As for this news, for an old reformed mac fanboy like myself this seems like it has been a long time coming. When Apple made the iPad Pro everyone said "Oh boy Mac styled interactions are coming to iOS" but I think anyone paying attention knew the reality was it was going the other way. MacOS will soon be just another walled garden.

A shame, but an expected one to be sure.
 
benoitb said:
The switch from PowerPC to Intel showed already that they don't value backward compatibility so I don't see what would prevent them from going ARM.
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When they went from IBM PowerPC to Intel x64 they provided one of the first reportedly really good compatability layers (basically a full CPU and support chips emulator in this case) that they say ran reasonably well, allowing Mac users to continue to use all their old programmes. Now I guess this didn't feel too slow because the x86 chips back then were already pretty strong compared to the PowerPC line which IBM had basically given up on a few years before outside of games consoles, meaning they could spend a few clock ticks emulating each PowerPC clock tick and still hit the old instruction deadline near about. Also, I have to take with a pinch of salt anything apple that's reviewed by apple users for historical reasons.

I'm not sure there will be so much leeway going from x64 to ARM though, since they're both pretty much straining against their power envelope these days. I used to believe that x86 chips having to support all of the old instruction sets from 8086 and up made them inherently inefficient, but these days with the size of cores and cache memory and things, supporting a few old instruction sets with a few thousand transistors here and there isn't going to break the (thermal) bank. And ARM chips are going a bit that way as well, having to support 32-bit data bus modes as well as the more modern 64-bit ones, although I dare say the 32-bit MUL instruction actually uses the 64-bit ALU and just discards the top 32 bits for example. But in the x86 line, being CISC they've got microcode and I suspect the 8086 layer is just a lookup table into microcode that runs on the same engine as x64 ISA stuff.

But ARM chips are cheaper than those from chipzilla, so they can probably afford to stuff more of them in those chassis (and indeed having discrete chips might help with thermal dissipation, if the jobs that run on them aren't too connected with the system CPU. I also don't see anything really stopping them going from x64 to ARM or any other ISA, but I don't think it's going to be quite as seamless as it was going from PPC to x86 was for the power users.
 
TBH, this is not a surprise and we've been speculating at work as to when it would happen (we're just about to release our Windows software in native MacOS builds for the first time). XCode uses the LLVM/LLDB suite of dev tools, which can build for both ARM and x86/x64 at the push of a button. Compatibility won't be an issue and free tools such as FPC (which we use) are already there.

If I had to speculate, then I'd say that low-end macs would have the ARM chip, which would enable all native mac apps from the app store. More power-user stuff from the Mac Pro and MBP user set will likely require an x86 in some form for the initial roll-out, as ARMs emulating x86s is a pretty poor show at present so the high-end macs will likely have both the ARM and Intel CPUs present until Apple's ARM catches up.

But an eventual ARM-only power/pro Mac has a couple of drawbacks -

1. Apple won't be locked-in with Intel, but will be with software vendors. They'll have to be nice to the likes of MS for their Office suite, Adobe et al so that their applications get updated.
2. A lot of users run either bootcamp or parallels (or Virtualbox for the masochists) and up to now it's pretty damned good for running your Windows apps, virtualbox notwithstanding (it's free software, after all). Emulation won't be good with only an ARM driving it, and bootcamp will have to go. That will make quite a lot of power users angry in the short term.
 
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