Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeepYogurt | Hacker News Reader

Goldmont is the atom line and not related to skylake. Apple has been building cpus for years now and it's unfair to claim that the apple chips blow the intel ones out of the water based on some simple int/fp benchmarks. I agree that they will lose apple in time, but "in time" could be on the order of 10 years.

View on HN

10 years isn't that long in a fab-scale company.

I would be absolutely shocked if Apple did not already have MacBook-level ARM cores running macOS in their development labs. Just as Apple had OSX running on Intel hardware for years while developing/selling PPC.

I think there's a very good chance we see a MacBook form factor laptop running an ARM chip in the next few years. I'd buy one, having a laptop with multi-day battery life would be awesome. I don't need super performance on my MacBook.

Not to mention that Apple has been running their OSs on ARM for years now so it wouldn't exactly be groundbreaking for them. Kind of like how when they switched to Intel they had already has x86 builds running for years prior. It's only a matter of time really.

There are a fair number of people buying Apple Laptops that use them for virtualizing Windows. I'd expect that a transition to ARM would only be able to happen for some of the lineup. It couldn't be across the board as it wouldn't run Windows. That would present a new challenge for folks who don't understand much about tech and wouldn't be able to differentiate the product lines properly.

Isn't Windows ARM ready now? A bunch of ARM laptops w/ Windows 10 are coming out this year.

I think it requires special hardware (x86 emulation, which is 32 bit only), and many apps won't be ported to ARM for a while.

That being said Apple might find x86 emulation useful too.

So you run on ARM just to do x86 emulation? How does it work?

Windows might have been recompiled to ARM but it will take a while before all apps have. That's also why WinRT was a failure. You couldn't run anything useful on it.

RT's big problem was the lockdown. They wanted everyone to use the Windows Store. You can't even run architecture-neutral .NET apps on the desktop in RT without a developer unlock.

Yes, but the two things that keep people using Windows are legacy applications and games. They’d also have to be ported to ARM, and I don’t see that happening in a hurry.

Microsoft has been demoing x86 emulation on ARM for a while now (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171)

You can get their MacBook Retina with low TDP cpu's already (A1534 model). Reality is - usage experience is hardly acceptable, everything is way too slow.

Intel seems to be way above everyone in pushing performance/TDP. Apple might have comparable CPU's in iPhones, but they are only comparable for first 10 seconds - then they overheat and throttle. If we put good cooling on their CPU's then you have TDP in 15+ watt class which means poor battery life regardless of who made the CPU (Intel or Apple).

The only reason why all of this works with iOS in a first place is super insane power awareness on OS level: as soon as an app is not in view it basically stops almost all work (except for background handlers), and also their browser capabilities are very limited. To achieve 20h+ class of performance on laptops we either must accommodate the same principles (but hey that will probably kill almost any background web apps, like soundcloud) or invent better battery tech :(

The A10X in iPad Pro is pretty damn good, and it doesn't throttle as much as in the old Ax SoC. So I think A10X is close or already on par with Intel's low TDP CPU.

Then you have to realize on Intel's roadmap, there is nothing substantial changes in the next two years at those TDP SKUs apart from 10nm. While Apple already has A11x lined up and 7nm from TSMC. First time Apple and Intel SoC has Fab features size parity.

There are windows laptops with ARM chips as well running full Windows:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/hp-envy-x2-2017...

> multi-day battery life would be awesome. I don't need super performance on my Macbook.

I think the smartphone market shows that multi-day battery life is not something the average person will trade a decrease in device performance for. And that's on phones, where you also don't have much practical opportunity to use the device plugged in, unlike a macbook. I'd be really surprised to see this tradeoff made on macbooks.

> I'd buy one, having a laptop with multi-day battery life would be awesome

Apple wouldn't use the technology for a multi-day battery life, they'd use it to make the laptop thinner/lighter (they've already started making MBP batteries smaller than they need be, leaving empty space in the case)

That being said, Apple has been waiting for Cannonlake for LPDDR4 support.

Goldmont's arch is essentially just Skylake scaled down; in the words of the Wikipedia article "The Goldmont architecture borrows heavily from the Skylake Core processors"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com