First Arm Macs: 13-Inch MacBook Pro, Redesigned iMac; Late 2020 or Early 2021

It's nice to see Apple following Microsoft's lead hopefully they have something as nice as the Surface Pro X to put on display

Because almost nothing runs on arm64 windows. Even visual studio code was just recently ported.

Also other companies don’t have access to apple’s arm chips with great single core performance.

The Windows PC industry has historically been, and still is, much more dependent on 3rd party software than the Apple ecosystem. So performance will not be good without porting 3rd party software to ARM.

It's similar problem to how Chromebooks have still not really displaced Windows laptops except at the very low end of the market.

Although the significance of this seems lower now than at any time I can remember as more happens in a browser than ever. Windows 10 apparently is fully ARM compatible with a built-in x86 emulation layer, so perhaps it could work.

ARM laptops already exist https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/surface-pro-x-arm-app-com...

>why wouldn’t HP, Dell, Asus and the rest make ARM laptops?

They already do, but they aren't as popular or as capable for two reasons:

The first is that only Apple can take advantage of any speed or power management improvements that a switch to a different CPU might provide, and that's because software development for Windows is very much not slaved to the App Store in terms of application development. That wasn't through lack of trying by Microsoft in the early 2010s (Metro/UWP and the disaster that was Windows 8/8.1), but as a consequence of that failure Windows applications aren't developed with a mobile-first paradigm or cross-platform support, so their ability to be managed by the OS is more limited.

The second (which is also an implication of the first) is that the only time ARM can actually outperform x86 designs is when a single-digit-watt power envelope is required. In Apple's case, it's required because they refuse to implement a proper thermal management solution in their laptops, and as such using processors that can reach 4 GHz for about 5 seconds until they hit 100C and have to aggressively throttle back are a waste (and their fans spin up to 100%, and excessively heat up the keyboard and the base of the laptop).

By going to a processor type that will ultimately be significantly slower but much more consistent in terms of performance, it's possible to both use alternate cooling solutions (like fully passive cooling) and provide a much more consistent user experience. And provided that the GPU is any better than Iris IGP, and that video encoding is otherwise accelerated (i.e. Quick Sync), professional (non-developer) users will still notice an upgrade.

And sure, while developers will lose in terms of raw performance, Apple knows that developers that go out of their way to use their products are more than willing to make compromises and concessions to use their ecosystem. On the other hand, those who are concerned about performance don't (and never) buy Macbooks.

Possible so, unless Apple makes the ARM chip run Intel code. Windows is overrated now and only Windows 10 matters at this point in time.

For $150 you can buy a cheap Intel based PC laptop with Windows 10 on it.

I think Bootcamp might work for ARM based Linux and the ARM version of Windows 10. At least Raspberry PIs that are ARM based can run those.

Almost definitely - yes.

I think the more interesting possibility is that one may have to jailbreak a Macbook Pro to run your own apps and/or OS.

Controlling one's destiny / not having to work with other companies since Apple loathes everyone else.

Wouldn't surprise me if they also want to make the laptops even thinner once again.

Performance per watt is the biggest advantage, Apple will get fast laptops with extremely long battery life. Cost per performance is a very close second, ARM CPUs are a fraction of the cost of Intel CPUs.

It’s also speculated that with active cooling ARM will enable high performance Macs at a lower price point. It’s very unclear how well they will be able to match AMD and Intel at the highest performance levels.

I would think that most video, and photo processing apps are using the GPU rather than custom assembly on the CPU since you have hundreds of cores on a GPU.

Does it really matter for the Pro line, if there will be something that gives Xeon run for its money? Say twice as fast or twice as many cores for the same price? Once Pro on ARM is out, and it probably will be the last in a lineup, there will be a lot of software with native ARM support. At that point (unless there is some INSANE advantage that Xeons would give), it is pretty much given that it will become ARM. Question is only in how quickly Apple can come up with something that is noticeable beating Xeons performance-wise.

I expect the price will not budge at all.

Given that my iPhone's A11 Bionic beats my desktop's i5-7400 on Geekbench's single-core benchmark, I would expect that a newer desktop-optimized Apple chip would destroy most Intel laptop chips.

An ISA doesn't just exist in a vacuum. There is also the compiler toolchain, runtime libs, developer mindshare and years of very smart people thinking about the ISA.

A $1e12 company doesn't have to pick the "pinnacle" of ISA/CPU possible. They just have to pick one that is good enough to meet their financial goals.

Didn’t Apple invest in ARM in 1990?

I think you fail to grasp the sheer amount of time to create a new instruction set, easily a decade to get to the level ARM is now. Not just the hardware, but debuggers, tooling etc etc. Can't see that paying off

Also, the kernel codebase, which is shared with iPhones, will be able to target a single architecture

The instruction set matters less for performance than people think. But it does matter a lot for the ecosystem: low-level hyper-optimized libraries for certain operations (think BLAS), tooling, developers understanding how to best write for it, etc. Creating all of that will take a long time no matter how much money you throw at it. For ARM, that ecosystem is probably the second best in the world, and in particular Apple has been building it up for themselves for more than a decade since the first iPhone.

Additionally, sharing the ISA means that the ARM reference cores will always be available as a backstop if Apple's custom chips start running into trouble for whatever reason. IIRC, Qualcomm was doing a lot of hopping between full custom cores and ARM reference ones depending on which one happened to work better some particular year.

ISAs are somewhat orthogonal to performance these days, so this move is more or less switching to Apple CPU designs. Apple has rapidly iterated and improved in-house designs since basically the A4 iPad.

Apple effectively has its own proprietary ARM designs, best in the world, and production relationships with chip manufacturers to make them in huge volume. Dumping that for some clean sheet of paper design without real world customers, tool chains, and manufacturing to try to gain a tiny percent in performance and/or cost would be immensely foolish.

It’s been speculated Apple could even license the x86 instruction set to include a x86 coprocessor in every one of their designs.

Because Apple's business is not doing "their own thing".

Apple's business is taking something that already is proven to work, and integrate it into something that makes money.

ARM is proven to work. It was designed for phones, tablets, routers, everything.

That means you could go to a factory like TSMC and they can reuse in excess of 95% of their hardware chip templates. You can reuse work done in iOS hardware too.

We are talking about freaking less than 10 nanometer scale designs!! The transistor's layout at those scales is not even square but calculated with quantum effects with very complex software, and retouched by hand with very expensive feedback using electron and X-rays microscopes.

That also means you can reuse the compilers that already exist, the transpilers and the toolchain in general.

Hardware designs need literally years of testing in very sophisticated machines(supercomputers) before you use them. Remember that if you make a mistake your entire die is wrong, million of dollars go to the toilet. And you always make mistakes before the design is mature.

It is not software that you could update easily and cheaply.

If you were to do your own thing , your chips would cost you 100x to 1000x to make just in money. It would also cost you orders of magnitude in time to market.

Of course a $trillion company can waste money away(until there is no more money left) but probably they want their money to give profit and create wealth instead of consuming it.

Docker on ARM Linux doesnt use x86 emulation, I'm not sure why Docker on ARM macOS would.

edit: I am aware not all Docker containers run on aarch64. But that has been changing already, and presumably would accelerate if Apple goes all in on ARM.

Why would it mean that?

No Apple has so far rejected touchscreens based on human interface concerns, ARM is not changing that.