ARM Mac Impact on Intel
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
I keep searching for "Graviton" in these thinkpieces. I keep getting "no results found."
Mac ARM laptops mean cloud ARM VMs.
And Amazon's Graviton2 VMs are best in class for price-performance. As Anandtech said:
If you’re an EC2 customer today, and unless you’re tied to x86 for whatever reason, you’d be stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances once they become available, as the cost savings will be significant.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
Amazon is exactly the kind of company that would take 50% margin on their x86 servers and 0% margin on their Graviton servers in order to engineer a long term shift that's in their favor - the end of x86 server duopoly (or monopoly depending on how the wind is blowing).
Many people complain about AWS' networking costs, but I also suspect these are generally at-cost. A typical AWS region has terabits upon terabits of nano-second scale latency fiber ran between its AZs and out to the wider internet. Networking is an exponential problem; AWS doesn't overcharge for egress, they just simply haven't invested in building a solution that sacrifices quality for cost.
Amazon really does not have a history of throwing huge margins on raw compute resources. What Amazon does is build valuable software and services around those raw resources, then put huge margins on those products. EC2 and S3 are likely very close to 0% margin; but DynamoDB, EFS, Lambda, etc are much higher margin. I've found AWS Transfer for SFTP [1] to be the most egregious and actually exploitative example of this; it effectively puts an SFTP gateway in front of an S3 bucket, and they'll charge you $216/month + egress AND ingress at ~150% the standard egress rate for that benefit (SFTP layers additional egress charges on-top-of the standard AWS transfer rates).
Obviously it's on demand pricing and the hardware isn't quite the same, with Hetzner using individual servers with 1P chips. Amazon also has 10gbps networking.
But still, zero margin? Let's call it a factor of two to bridge the monthly and on demand gap - does it really cost Amazon five times as much to bring you each core of Zen 2 even with all their scale?
I don't think Amazon overcharges for what they provide, but I bet their gross margins even on the vanilla offerings are pretty good, as are those of Google Cloud and Azure.
I'm skeptical about this claim. Most cloud providers try to justify their exorbitant bandwidth costs by saying it's "premium", but can't provide any objective metrics on why it's better than low cost providers such as hetzner/ovh/scaleway. Moreover, even if it were more "premium", I suspect that most users won't notice the difference between aws's "premium" bandwidth and a low cost provider's cheap bandwidth. I think the real goal of aws's high bandwidth cost is to encourage lock-in. After all, even if azure is cheaper than aws by 10%, if it costs many times that for you to migrate all your over to azure, you'll stick with aws. Similarly, it encourages companies to go all-in into aws, because if all of your cloud is in aws, you don't need to pay bandwidth costs for shuffling data between your servers.
What? My $2000 Titan V GPU and $10 raspberry pi both payed for themselves vs EC2 inside of a month.
Many of AWS's managed services burn egregious amounts of EC2, either by mandating an excessively large central control instance or by mandating one-instance-per-(small organizational unit). The SFTP example you list is completely typical. I've long assumed AWS had an incentive structure set up to make this happen.
"We're practically selling it at cost, honest!" sounds like sales talk.
This seems to be demonstrably false, given that Amazon Lightsail exists. Along with some compute and storage resources:
$3.50 gets you 1TB egress ($0.0035/GB)
$5 gets you 2TB egress ($0.0025/GB)
Now, its certainly possible that Amazon is taking a loss on this product. Its also possible that they have data showing that these types of users don't use more than a few percent of their allocated egress. But I suspect that they are actually more than capable of turning a profit at those rates.
Clearly they have margins, and fat ones at that.
Shameless plug - partly because of the high cost of sftp in AWS, and lack of ftp (understandable), and a bunch of people wanting the same in Azure / GCS, that made us start https://docevent.io which has proved quite popular.
And to make another point. Apple isn't a lower-end cost cutting laptop makers.
Apple sell ~20M Mac per year. Intel ship roughly ~220M PC CPU per year ( I think recent years saw the number trending back towards 250M) That is close to 10%. Not an insignificant number. Apple only use expensive Intel CPU. Lots of survey shows most $1000+ PC belongs to Apple. Most of the business Desktop, and Laptop uses comparatively cheap Intel CPU. i.e I would not be surprised the median price of Apple's Intel CPU purchase is at least 2x to total market median if not more. In terms of revenue that is 20% of Intel's consumer segment.
They used to charge a premium for being the leading edge Fab. You cant get silicon that is better than Intel. You are basically paying those premiums for having the best. Then Intel's Fab went from 2 years leading, to now 2 years behind, ( That is 4 years difference. ) all while charging the same price. And since Intel wants to keep its margin, it is not much of a surprise customers, ( Apple and Amazon ) looks for alternative.
Here is another piece on Amazon Graviton 2.
https://threader.app/thread/1274020102573158402
May be I should submit it to HN.
Apple owns the premium PC market, it’s Mac division is not only the most profitable PC company in the world, it might be more profitable than all the others combined.
It’s share of Intels most expensive desktop CPUs is much higher than its raw market share.
If macOS goes ARM and there's a sizable population of developers testing and fixing these issues constantly, the math changes in favor of Graviton and it would make it a no-brainer to pick the cheaper alternative once everything "just works".
I've been shifting my work to ARM based machine for some years now, mainly to reduce power consumption. One of my current projects - A problem validation platform[4](Go) has been running nicely on a ARM server(Cavium ThunderX SoCs) on scaleway; but weirdly scaleway decided to quit on ARM servers[5] sighting hardware issues which not many of the ARM users seem to have faced. Only ARM specific issue I faced with scaleway was that the reboot required power-off.
[1]cudf: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/da3de9b188d41570f4e988ceb5...
[2]Ray: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/aa0bf2feb02aedb3b38eef203b...
[3]Apache Arrow: https://gist.github.com/heavyinfo/04e1326bb9bed9cecb19c2d603...
[4]needgap: https://needgap.com
[5]Scaleway ditched ARM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865925
I have a hunch our industry will need to increasingly deal with ARM environments.
What is the connection here ? ARM servers would be fine in a separate discussion. What does it have to do with Macs ? Macs aren't harbingers of anything. They have set literally no trend in the last couple of decades, other than thinness at all costs. If you mean that developers will use Gravitons to develop mac apps, why/how would that be ?
"Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction set doesn't matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud.
That's bull*t. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test "at home" (and by "at home" I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)."
So I would argue there is a strong connection.
I can see this making sense to Torvalds, being a low-level guy, but is it true for, say, Java web server code?
Amazon are betting big on Graviton in EC2. It's no longer just used in their 'A1' instance-types, it's also powering their M6g, C6g, and R6g instance-types.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcin...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/24/linus_torvalds_adopts...
Yeah, I'm able to do remote debugging in a remote VM but the feedback loop is much longer, impacting productivity, morale and time to solve the bug, a lot of externalised costs that all engineers with reasonable experience are aware of. If I can develop my code on the same architecture that it'll be deployed my mind is much more in peace, when developing in x86_64 to deploy on ARM I'm never sure that some weird cross-architecture bug will pop up. No matter how good my CI/CD pipeline is, it won't ever account for real-world usage.
it's harder in all the way you describe, but it's much more likely the software will survive migrating to the next debian/centos release unchanged.
it all boils down to the temporal scale of the project.
I have to agree. It's not like we're all running Darwin on servers instead of Linux. Surely the kernel is a more fundamental difference than the CPU architecture.
Hahaha then you have not kept attention. Apple led the trend away from beige boxes. Style of keyboard used. Large track pads. USB. First to remove floppy drive. Both hardware, software and web design has been heavily inspired by Apple. Just look at icons used, first popularized by Apple.
Ubuntu desktop is strongly inspired by macOS. Operating system with drivers preloaded through update mechanism was pioneered by Apple. Windows finally seem to be doing this.
Being cheaper isn't enough here - Graviton needs to be faster and it needs to do that over generations. It needs to _sustain_ its position to become attractive. Intel can fix price in a heartbeat - they've done that in the past when they were behind. Intel's current fab issues does make this a great time to strike, but what about in 2 years? 3 years? 4? Intel's been behind before, but they don't stay there. Switching to Epyc Rome at the moment is an easy migration - same ISA, same memory model, vendor that isn't new to the game, etc... But Graviton needs a bigger jump, there's more investment there to port things over to ARM. Will that investment pay off over time is a much harder question to answer.
I agree to some extent but don’t underestimate how much this has changed in the cloud era: it’s never been cheaper to run multiple ISAs and a whole lot of stuff is running in environments where switching is easy (API-managed deployments, microservices, etc.) and the toolchains support ARM already thanks to phones/tablets and previous servers - so much code will just run on the JVM, high level languages like JavaScript Python, or low-level ones like Go and Rust with great cross-compiler support, etc. and hardware acceleration also takes away the need to pour engineer-hours into things like OpenSSL which might have blocked tons of applications.
At many businesses that is probably over the threshold where someone can say it’s worth switching the easy n% over since they’ll save money now and if the price/performance crown shifts back so can their workloads. AWS has apparently already done this for managed services like load-balancers and I’m sure they aren’t alone in watching the prices very closely. That’s what Intel is most afraid of: the fat margins aren’t coming back even if they ship a great next generation chip.
I love working on ARM, but with the licensing model I'm not sure how much of a positive return Amazon would really be able to squeeze from their investment.
It also potentially brings them a truckload of future headaches if any of their cloud competitors raise anti-trust concerns down the road.
Beyond that, I think Apple, ARM and AMD get a lot of credit for their recent designs - a lot of which is due, but quite a bit of which should really go to TSMC.
The TSMC 7nm fabrication node is what's really driven microprocessors forward in the last few years, and hardly anyone outside of our industry has ever heard of them.
I don't know that Amazon couldn't transition to RISC-V if they needed to in a couple of years.
Microsoft controls a lot of lucrative business-centric markets. An advantage that seems to have helped MS Azure surpass AWS in marketshare. One of Microsoft's weaknesses is their in-ability to migrate away from x86 in any meaningful way. IBM could used Redhat to push the corporate server market away from x86 under the guise of lower operating costs, which could deal a tremendous blow to MS, leaving Amazon and Google with an opening to hit the Office and Azure market.
You overestimate the AWS customer base. Lots of them do silly things that cost them a lot of money.
It's often easy to test if scaling the instance size/count resolves a performance issue. If it does, you know you can fix the problem by burning money.
When you have reasonable certainty of the outcome spending money is easier than engineering resources.
And later it's easier for an engineer to justify performance optimizations, if the engineer can point to a lower cloud bill..
I'm not saying it's always a well considered balance, just that burning money temporarily is a valid strategy.
Why do you think that? Cloud means linux, apple does not even have a server OS anymore.
We are seeing some ARM devices entering the server space, but these have been in progress for ears and have absolutely nothing to do with apples (supposed) CPU switch.
One reason is to get the same environment they get in a cloud deployment scaled down. Another is Apple keeps messing with compatibility, most recent example being the code signing thing slowing down script executions.
Edit, this includes docker on Mac: it's not native.
> Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market?
> It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.
Sure they have lower margins on desktop but these brings sh!t tons of cash, cash you will then use for research and to develop your next desktop and server CPUs. If I believe this page [1], consumer CPUs brought almost $10 billions in 2019... In comparison, server CPUs generated $7 billions of revenues... And these days, Intel has like >90% of that market.
Other players (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, ...) were playing in a walled garden and couldn't really compete on any of that (except pricing because their stuff was crazy expensive).
So not only they were sharing the server market with Intel but Intel was most likely earning more than the sum of it all from their desktop CPUs... More money, more research, more progress shared between the consumer and server CPUs: rinse and repeat and eventually you will catch up. And also, they could sell their server CPUs for a lot less than their "boutique" competitors.
You just can't compete with a player which has almost unlimited funds and executes well...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019....
People paid the IBM tax for decades. Intel is the new IBM. Wherever you look, Intel's lineup is not competitive and it is only surviving due to inertia.
But Amdhal's Law shows us this doesn't make sense for most people.
Graviton is still almost an order of magnitude slower than a VPS of the same cost, which is around what the hardware and infra costs Amazon.
The limitation is not technical (as hackintoshes demonstrate); it’s legal.
That said, it would be great to be able to run Mac software (and iOS) on server-based VMs.
I just don’t think it will happen at scale, because lawyers.
what are my options if I want a ARM laptop with say good mobile processor performance close to the i7-8850H found in a 2018 mbp 15, 16GB RAM and 512GB NVME SSD to setup my day to day dev environment (Linux + Golang + C++ etc)?
surface x is the only ARM laptop you can easily purchase, but it is windows only and the processor is way too slow. there is also close to 0 response from app vendors to bring their apps to native ARM windows environment.
Apple fans just seem to be in denial about being late to the game.
I have to admit, the Apple's ARM processors will likely be significantly faster per core. But they are not the driver of the switch to ARM. If anything, Chromebooks were.
If you develop for Mac, chances are you want your CI to use the same target hardware, which means cloud ARM hardware to run Mac VMs.
Wishful thinking though, probably.
there's still a load of non scale-out services that the world depends upon.
Ever since Cavium gave up Arm server products and pivoted to HPC, there hasn't been a real Arm compititor.
Ampere is almost all ex-Intel.
1. Back in the 1990s, the big UNIX workstation vendors were sitting where Intel is now at the high end, being eaten from the bottom by derivatives of what was essentially a little embedded processor for dumb terminals and scientific calculators. Taken in isolation, Apple's chips aren't an example of low-margin high-volume product eating its way up the food chain, but the whole ARM ecosystem is.
2. For a lot of the datacenter roles being played by Intel Xeons, flops/Watt or iops/watt isn't the important metric. For many important workloads, the processor is mostly there to orchestrate DMA from the SSD/HDD controller to main memory and DMA from main memory to the network controller. The purchaser of the systems is looking to maximize the number of bytes per second divided by the amortized cost of the system plus the cost of the electricity. My understanding is that even now, some of the ARM designs are better than the Atoms in term of TDP, even forgetting the cost advantages.
I invested in ARM (ARMH) back in 2006, partly because I realized that whether Apple or Android won more marketshare, nearly everyone was going to have an ARM-based smartphone in a few years. Part of it was also realizing the above and hoping ARM would take a good share of the server market. SoftBank took ARM private before we saw much inroads in the server market, but it was still one of the best investments I've made.
Of course, maybe I'm just lucky and my analysis was way off.
1) which 2006 analyses proved wrong? it would be interesting to see which assumptions made sense in 2006 but were ultimately proven wrong.
2) which companies are you evaluating in 2020, and why?
thanks for sharing.
1) I thought the case for high-density/low-power ARM in the datacenter was pretty clear-cut, but it was an obvious enough market that within a few multi-year design cycles, Intel would close the gap with Atoms and close that window of opportunity forever, especially considering Intel's long-running fabrication process competitive advantage. In late 2012, one of my friends in the finance industry wanted to be "a fly on the wall" in an email conversation between me and a hedge fund manager he really respected who had posted on SeekingAlpha that his fund was massively short ARMH. A few email back-and-forths shook my confidence enough to convince me that the server market window had closed, and that it was possible (though unlikely) that Atom was about to take over the smartphone market. I reduced my position at that time by just enough to guarantee I'd break even if ARMH dropped to zero. In hindsight, I'm still not sure that was the wrong thing to do given what I knew at the time. I had two initial thesies: the smartphone thesis had played out and was more-or-less believed by everyone in the market, and the server thesis was reaching the end of that design window and I was worried that Intel was not far from releasing an ARM-killer Atom, backed up by the arguments of this hedge fund manager. I'm really glad the hedge fund manager didn't spook me enough to close out my position entirely.
2) I'm not a great stock picker. I've had some great calls and had about as many pretty bad calls. I'm now doing software development, but my degree is in Mechanical Engineering, and I took a CPU design course (MIT's 6.004) back in college. I think my edge over the market is realizing when the market is under-appreciating a really good piece of engineering, though I punch well below my weight in the actual business side analysis.
Jim Keller is a superstar engineer, who attracted other superstars, and I don't think the market ever really figured that out. Jim Keller retired now, so there goes about half my investment edge. Though, maybe I'm just deluding myself on the impact really good engineering really has on the business side.
Elixir, my main programming language, will use all the cores in the machine, e.g. parallel compilation. Even if an ARM-based mac has worse per-core performance than Intel, I am ahead.
Apple can easily give me more cores to smooth the transition. Whatever the profit margin was for Intel on the CPU, they can give it to me instead. And they can optimize the total system for better performance, battery life and security.
HAHAHA you sweet summer child.
Next thing you know, you'll be demanding Apple puts back the heatpipe in the Macbook Air for cooling the cpu instead of hoping theres enough airflow over the improperly seated heatsink (which just has to work until the warranty expires ;) )
They now sell an iPad, arguably better than any of the non-iPadOS competition, for $350.
The iPhone SE, one of the fastest smartphones on the market (only other iPhones are faster) starts at just $399.
They’ve aggressively been cutting prices, I believe, so that they can expand the reach of the services business. They’re cutting costs to expand their userbase.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the return of the 12-inch MacBook at the $799 to $899 price point, now that they no longer have to pay Intel a premium for their chips.
I just replaced my Google Pixel (4 years old) with an SE and it's like... They're not even comparable. I'm sure it makes clear sense as to how so much progress could be made in 4 years, and how it could cost so much less (I paid $649 USD for the Pixel), but it feels a bit magical as a consumer and infrequent phone user. It's a fantastic little device.
I'm still 900% pissed about the MacBook Air they sold me in 2018 and I resent the awful support they gave me for the keyboard (It's virtually unusable already), but as a phone business, they seem hard to beat right now.
Like, give me a custom launcher option (custom everything options), emulation of classic consoles and handhelds, and easy plug and play access via a PC. If I can't even get one of those, I'm on Android regardless of how shiny I think Apple hardware is.
But if you don't want nay of that, it probably works grate. Just not for me.
I do miss a home screen widget and some apps, but I think overall the experience is really nice, and being able to talk to the iMessage people would be nice.
I built a Hackintosh on a Thinkpad and Handoff, AirDrop and all those connections are way more useful than I thought. It’s been 3 years and Android/Windows seems to be pretty much in the same state minus some minimal improvements that really don’t add that much value.
Integration and unified workflows is where it’s at for me at least.
According to the usually accurate Ming Chi Kuo, the entry level iPad will be moving to using a top of the line chip as well, which is a needed change.
>Kuo first says that Apple will launch a new 10.8-inch iPad during the second half of 2020, followed by a new iPad mini that’s between 8.5-inches and 9-inches during the first half of 2021. According to the analyst, the selling points of these iPads will be “the affordable price tag and the adoption of fast chips,” much like the new iPhone SE.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/21/21298607/first-arm-mac-ma...
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...
>Overall, in terms of performance, the A13 and the Lightning cores are extremely fast. In the mobile space, there’s really no competition as the A13 posts almost double the performance of the next best non-Apple SoC. The difference is a little bit less in the floating-point suite, but again we’re not expecting any proper competition for at least another 2-3 years, and Apple isn’t standing still either.
Last year I’ve noted that the A12 was margins off the best desktop CPU cores. This year, the A13 has essentially matched best that AMD and Intel have to offer – in SPECint2006 at least. In SPECfp2006 the A13 is still roughly 15% behind.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
I think performance per watt is going to be just as important as overall performance. Apple's "little" cores were a new design in the A13, and compare very well against stock ARM cores on a performance per watt basis.
>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...
It will be interesting to see how much performance they can get when they are on a level playing field when it comes to power and cooling constraints.
for instance: Integer WorkloadsLZMA CompressionLZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm) is a lossless compression algorithm. The algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme (the dictionary size is variable and can be as large as 4GB). LZMA features a high compression ratio (higher than bzip2).The LZMA workload compresses and decompresses a 450KB HTML ebook using the LZMA compression algorithm. The workload uses the LZMA SDK for the implementation of the core LZMA algorithm.
They compress just 450KB of text as a benchmark - even the dict size is greater then the input. If both fits the CPU caches - the results are supreme, if not - horrible compared to the former. Also it'd vastly depend how fast the CPU can switch to full turbo mode (for servers that doesn't matter at all)
[0]: https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf
I agree these benchmarks have issues, but there's a consistent trend (eg. AnandTech's SPEC results are similar—they use active cooling to avoid the question about thermals) and the most reliable benchmarks, like compilers, aren't outliers.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3006268/tested-why-the-ipad-...
That's not true.
We keep hearing this especially from the Apple-bubble blogs, yet why does it not translate into higher end work being done on these iPads if they are supposedly so powerful, yet all we ever see is digital painting work that isn't pushing it at all and extremely basic video editing.
Also good luck to Apple if they lock down macOS the same way.
Could make the Macbook Pro the fastest laptop in some benchmarks while also offering more affordable options.
Apple's particular ARM CPU core happens to look like a beast vs. Intel's particular x86 CPU core. But those are far from the only implementations. AMD's x86 is, at the moment, also very strong, and incredibly efficient. Lookup Zephyrus G14 reviews for example - the AMD 4800HS in that is crazy fast & efficient vs. comparable Intel laptops.
Similarly, lookup Apple A12/A13 vs. Qualcomm benchmarks - Snapdragon is also ARM, but it kinda sucks vs. Apple's A12/A13.
In terms of power realize that there's quite a bit of overlap here. Apple's big cores on the A13 pull about 5W. That's not really that different from X86 CPU cores at similar frequencies. The quad-core i5 in a macbook air, for example, pulls around 10w sustained. It's just a product design question on what the power draw stops at. More power = more performance, so usually if you can afford the power you spend it. So far there's been relatively little product overlap between x86 & ARM. Where there has been, like the recent ARM server push, power consumption differences tend to immediately go away. Laptops will be a _very_ interesting battle ground here, though, as differences get amplified.
Intel chips have basically stagnated for about 5 years and they abused their monopoly and market leader positioning by offering marginal improvements each year in order to protect margins, as well as fab shrink problems that insiders describe as coming from culture not dissimilar to Boeing; just with less lives at stake.
In the meantime, competitor foundries have caught up, and exceed Intel's ability to ship in volume. ARM obviously is eyeing the desktop, but more critically server market so the latest ARM IP is geared towards higher performance computing, quite well I may say.
State of the art fab + state of the art processor IP = state of the art processor. Not a huge surprise :)
they WILL compete, and they've been playing leapfrog with AMD for years.
I'm waiting to see the intel response for the new 32 and 64 core chips from amd.
Since normal processors calculate a lot of important things, I'm wondering if there really are fewer lives at stake. Of course it would be more indirect, but I could imagine that there are many areas where lives are tied to PCs doing the right thing.
E.g. what if a processor bug leads to security issues in hospital infrastructure.
Otherwise it's just fantasy sports.
(Fun and potentially useful, if you want to plan ahead, play the market, and other causes...)
This[1] claims ARM Macs will be unveiled today (Monday) at WWDC. I guess we'll see soon enough.
___
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/21/21298607/first-arm-mac-ma...
Until we actually have details of Apple's implementations, there's no realistic way we can discuss
> how the new ARM-powered MacBooks will perform compared to the Intel-powered MacBooks
However, I can also see their chips outperforming Intel in sustained workloads. Apple has a history of crippling Intel performance by allowing the CPU to only run at full speed for a short while, quickly letting it ramp up the temperature before clocking down aggressively. Some of that is likely because of their power delivery system, some of it is because they choose to limit their cooling capacity to make their laptops make less noise or with fewer "unattractive" airholes. Either way, put the same chip in a Macbook and in a Windows laptop and the Windows laptop will run hotter but with better performance.
However, with a more efficient chip, Apple could allow their CPU to run at a higher frequency than Intel for longer, benefiting sustained workloads despite the IPC and frequency being lower on paper. This is especially important for devices like the Macbook Air, where they didn't even bother to connect a heatpipe to the CPU and aggressively limit the performance of their Intel chip.
I'd even consider the conspiracy theory that Apple has been limiting their mobile CPU performance for the last few years to allow for a smoother transition to ARM. If they can outperform their current lineup even slightly, they can claim to have beaten Intel and then make their cooling solution more efficient again.
It does appear to be a very poor thermal design, but you can see that most of the issues appear to be from trying to make the user not feel the heat.
It feels a bit icky to leave performance on the table like that; since you paid for a CPU and are getting a marginal performance from it. But I remember Jobs giving a talk before about how "Computers are tools, and people don't care if their tools give them all it can, they care if they can get their work done with them well"
That's not a defense of a shitty cooling solution, but it is a defence of why they power limit the chips. When I got my first (and only) Macbook in 2011, it had more than twice the real battery life of any machine on the market. That meant that I was _actually_ untethered. That's what I cared about at the time much more than how much CPU I was getting.
The Windows laptop can't possibly run hotter than a Macbook, all of which reach the throttle temperature (~100 °C) almost instantly.
I actually agree to the artificially limited performance, artificially worsened thermals theory. The Macbook Air design is extremely fishy.
the vertices would be power, heat and perf.
Apple just hasn't shipped an arm chip with high power and "excessive" cooling.
With a new A14 chip combined with intel stagnation, it wouldn't be too crazy to see a 50-100% increase, especially if you looked at multi-core scores.
Also first i7 chip was released in 2008. (The chip you refer to appears to be modern though, from 2018.)
To prevent any misunderstandings, I agree A13 has performance comparable to a modern laptop. I just don't think Geekbench is a right tool to measure that difference.
What does that even mean? The Intel platform is running Android?
If this sounds like I'm saying it's apples (no pun intended) to oranges... that's pretty much the case. Apple is likey not going to produce an ARM chip in directly comparable fashion to an Intel chip. E.g. equal cache, memory bandwidth, TDP (using Intel calc method), PCI-e lanes etc. Mostly because it doesn't make sense to do so because Intel's chips are designed to be a component of the system while ARM chips are largely designed to be an SOC.
* They need to ramp the clockspeeds -- much easier to say than do.
* They need to include 256 or 512-bit SIMD operations without breaking the power budget.
* They need to design a consistent and fast RAM controller (and likely need to add extra channels)
* They need to integrate power-hungry USB4/thunderbolt into their system.
* They need to add a dozen extra PCIe 3 or 4 lanes without ballooning the power consumption.
* They need an interconnect (like QuickPath or HyperTransport/Infinity Fabric) so all these things can communicate.
These are the hard issues that Intel, AMD, IBM, etc all must deal with and form a much bigger piece of the puzzle than the CPU cores themselves when dealing with high-performance systems.
The access to iOS and macOS means that they can profile every single app everyone runs and improve real-world performance, and they do.
If you are a company that supplies anything (software or hardware) to Apple or Amazon, and you are operating on >20% gross margins, Apple and Amazon will destroy you, and destroy your margins. You have to continuously innovate and can't just relax and chill and collect your margins, like Intel has been doing for the past 5 years, milking their advantage that has evaporated.
Other than the modem, I don't think there's a component on the latest iPhones that has more than 20% margins for the supplier. Apple is ruthless. So is Amazon, when it comes to fulfilment.
Apple is using the same fabrication process as everyone else in a mature industy. There simply isn't 2x improvement possible unless everyone else was staggeringly inconpetent. Imagine Apple decided to build their own car, and made their own electric motors. Would you believe claims that their motors are 2x as efficient?
Single core performance is currently doubling every five years or so. We’re not about to see it double in the next 24 hours.
Apple's ARM chips probably perform much better than reference ARM chips because they are much closer to the micro architecture that Intel uses. But Apple's chips still consume less power than Intel chips used in laptops. The secret sauce is probably the fact that the SoC has cores with different performance and power profiles. Big cores are used for peak performance bursts and lots of small cores for energy efficiency while the device is waiting for user input.
I think Geekbench is measuring peak performance and not sustained performance but the numbers are probably correct. Making a representative comparison between mobile devices and desktops isn't possible because their different thermal profiles but it's highly likely that Apple will go for a passively cooled design if they can.
there is a time-honored way to do exactly that.
Constrain the comparison.
"Double the performance" (of $899 to $901 laptops with 2560x1440 resolution)
"Twice as fast" (as all laptops with thunderbolt 3 and no sd card reader)
Yeah, until they put the same chip, or better in a laptop envelope. Then what for Intel?
This was from 2016. People being surprised by this haven't been paying attention to where this was going:
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-he...
Also, I said it many times before, Intel trying to be as misleading as possible with the performance of its chips, such as renaming Intel Atom chips to "Intel Celeron/Pentium" and renaming the much weaker Core-M/Y-Series (the same chips used in Macbook Air for the past few years) as "Core i5" is going to bite them hard in the ass, when Apple's chips are going to show that they can beat "Intel Core i5". But Intel kept making this worse with each generation.
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-renames-core-m-core...
Maybe I'm spoiled because my development is mostly java, python, Go, docker, etc, all of which should have no runtime problem.
In terms of IDE, It looks like vscode is ported which is great.
I see two projects in my workflow: intellij and iterm2. I can live with a vanilla terminal but I'll need intellij. It looks like there's some[1] discussion around support.
1. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/commit/db531...
The biggest potential issue will be how people get hardware for doing the builds. Hopefully Apple will provide a good way of cross-compiling or a new machine that is suitable for datacenter deployment (ARM based mac mini?). We'll have to wait for the WWDC announcement to find out.
Outdated information: Windows on ARM requires you to build UWP apps which is more work than just a recompile.
When Apple moved to Intel the unintended effect was that Adobe et al finally optimized their software for Intel CPUs to the benefit of non-Apple users. Maybe this move will just have all those graphics people switch to Windows.
Isn't this already the case, especially for docker, due to FS perf on OSX ?
High-end desktops and cloud systems are getting really amazing performance, with 32 and 64-core threadrippers compiling the linux kernel befo[compile complete!]re you can finish your thought.
I think this is a by-product of amd and intel serving the cloud market, and it just happens to benefit the high-end desktops.
Would apple invest in a many many core pro machine just for the (whatever low number) of pro users they have?
Linux on laptop doesn't work that well, especially if you want a nice (HiDPI) screen. Microsoft is trying with the Linux emulation, but they are creepy with their snooping and telemetry, and will autoinstall Candy Crush and other shit.
- OS that supports HiDPI well - Windows 10 has good support for this now
- good touchpad - Surface touchpads are very close to Apple ones these days and I'd argue the key part of keyboards are superior as is the touch and pen support.
- unix environment as a first class citizen - WSL2 (while Linux not Unix) is a first class citizen.
How is Microsofts telemetry any more "snooping" than Apples telemetry? I mean they both do it...
The App Store requirements make it easier to control this transition on iOS than macOS. I wonder how many Brew apps will make the transition seamlessly?
The fact that MS has also tried several times to switch from ARM but no advantage has ever materialized also casts a huge doubt on the tactical advantages of an ARM migration. The power savings are not apparent: neither the Surface RT nor the Surface Pro X have significantly better battery life, likely because they've (very much like Apple will do) decided to reduce thickness. The performance is not there as both devices were reviewed as slow. And the cost advantage is also not there seeing that the Surface Pro X was more expensive than most of the Intel Surface Pros, at least for launch price (and we can certainly expect Apple not to lower prices, either).
I am guessing MS had more margins on the ARM devices, and that's about it, but it makes for a hard sale for users. Also those margins will evaporate as they are forced to reduce the price of the SP X.
Apple's previous migrations depended on the _huge_ performance improvement of the newer platform. Up to the point where porting programs to the new platform was not even always required, as the emulator would be performant enough to still show a performance improvement overall. In this case, the new platform has likely similar or slightly lower performance, and we care much more about power consumption, so emulation cost will be very noticeable and users will penalize non-native binaries heavily.
Apple has the advantage of the huge collection of iOS apps but I also hesitate whether this advantage will transfer to the MacBook or not. Most people do not buy MacBooks to run oversized iPhone apps. They already have the iPad for that.
[1]: https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devbbdc5ce4f
https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#bitcod...
John Siracusa: The same thing I would assume for architecture changes, especially if there was an endian difference, because endianness is visible from the C world, so you can’t target different endianness?
Chris Lattner: Yep. It’s not something that magically solves all portability problems, but it is very useful for specific problems that Apple’s faced in the past.
Given this, it's quite unlikely that Apple will go big endian in their Desktop/Laptop ARM CPUs.
Of course, Bitcode won't solve all portability problems, but it does solve many of them in this specific case.
It misses, developers use Macs to build stuff => It's easy to make arm compatible applications => The server (most profitable) domino falls.
I can imagine moving straight to ARM processors if its easy enough to work on and AWS/Google has a deployment option.
The dominos can cascade really fast, particularly in where the new demand for chips comes in, vs the existing one that will just run as it is now.
I expect good compute performance, good graphics performance, better battery life, and (hopefully) better price range. We'll see what's in store for us tomorrow.
It's as powerful as a Radeon RX 5500M, which is incredible when you consider that the A13 is passively cooled and the RX 5500M is actively cooled.
It's also 40% as powerful as the RTX 2080 Ti, the best-performing consumer GPU on the market, that draws hundreds of watts and very well cooled.
By some quick maths, performance/watt is an order of magnitude better on the A13 than GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA.
Yeah... going to need to see the work on that one.
Keep hearing these extremely bold claims about iPhone, iPad chips. But if they're truly that powerful why are we not filling compute farms with them? I mean the 2080 TI is $999 alone with just the card with much higher power and cooling requirements than the A13.
or is none of this really true at all to real world performance.
Does the same logic then hold in the datacentre? With the ability to add their own IP mean that AWS, Google etc can start to add new features (e.g. specialised accelerators) that would not be possible with Intel CPUs?
It's much more difficult in the data centre where you have customers who are going to be writing their own code. You have to build something very generic, you have to build an API, you have to create a software eco-system of libraries and examples and a community of users, and even then lots of people will be worried about lock-in. It's absolutely possible, and Google are already doing custom silicon with the TPUs, but it's a very different challenge.
I guess too that for Apple there is a huge advantage to having the custom silicon on the same SoC as the CPU whereas there is much less penalty for having it on a separate chip (as per TPUs) in the datacentre.
Will the Pro line of laptops continue on Intel or is it the whole line?
If it's the whole line, it's either going to be very good for developer tooling on ARM or it's going to be a nightmare.
I've been developing on Windows 10 ARM with WSL and it's pretty great, but it's not 100% there. I've had to switch back to x64 due to some tools not having ARM builds.
Yes it does. https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_46#_windows-arm64-i...
I use a Surface Pro X with LTE, having an always-connected, always-on machine is really nice.
Lol I’m kidding but exactly, I agree, plus they can make them in-house.
They mention in the introduction that a pre-press shop went from hours to run their bread and butter workflow to about 20 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic0dkf1iFOY
The Intel transition wasn't really a win on performance, but it was a total win for laptops from a power draw and waste heat perspective.
Further, would the AppleArm run BootCamp? What happen to thunderbolt, given it is ok now from Intel to use it (but in ARM)? Is Office compatibility still important to Apple and if so have Microsoft Apple product teams are already testing ARM version of Office on both WinArm and AppleArm? (Given that some small subset did run on iPad Pro, or even iPhone).
But unlike Windows, Apple has successful twice and given it can ignore our call for CUDA compatibility and worry about future Premiere/Adobe ... They would move. And we will move as well. Just not sure where we move to.
Sorry lots of questions. And the impact to Intel ... it is a side show and side issue. Games on.
What's so hard about it ? Your code is supposed to use something like a C stdlib, which has been ported to ARM obviously. So what makes it so much harder than to recompile everything?
Once the OS is ported, the system libraries are available, and the programming language has a compiler for the target architecture, i don't understand what's blocking.
* Assume sizes of types, endian, that type of stuff (endian is particularly troublesome).
* The threading model is very different, and it's very easy to write a lot of code which works on the x86 threading model and then explodes in interesting ways when put on ARM.
> endian is particularly troublesome
Arm is LE by default though.
I think unaligned accesses (e.g. packed structs) is also problematic, it’s either super slow or it faults (which might lead to an OS routine emulating it in software which is even slower, but if the OS does not emulate it’ll just crash).
Memory coherency is one. Check out the table of what reorderings processors are allowed to do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering#In_symmetric_m...
x86(-64) is very conservative, doing very little reordering. ARM is much more liberal, doing lots of reordering. The standard library may give you tools to write code which is correct across all architectures, by defining some portable memory model and then implementing that model on each architecture (in C++, std::atomic does that). But it's easy not to use those tools properly: you can write code which is incorrect according to the standard library, which works on x86 because it is conservative, but which fails on ARM because it is liberal. Detecting bugs like that statically is an open research problem, and cross-platform concurrency bugs are among the hardest there are to debug.
There's more than just reorderings, too. A local wizard tells me "On ARM, you can have cores where there is no implicit "propagation"... i.e. if you write to some memory location from core "A", core "B" may never see those changes. You have to use synchronization primitives to make changes visible. This also means that the old dirty trick of volatile instead of proper synchronization can definitely fail here.". My guess would be that cores like that won't turn up on Apple laptops, but who knows.
Another example is vector operations. If you want to make use of explicit vector operations, rather than relying on compiler autovectorisation, you need to write code around the shapes and operations supported by the processor. Those are different on ARM and x86 - although i think the instruction set on ARM is better-designed than that on x86, so at least it might be easier to port from x86 to ARM than vice versa. Still, here's a taste of the sort of work it takes to make vector code work properly even on different ARM chips:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/08/07/how-arm-nerfed-neon-...
MS did it this way so that any x86 extensions can continue to be run under emulation whilst the bulk of the application can run natively, according to: https://uk.pcmag.com/news-analysis/92340/microsoft-explains-...
Also think about anti-trust! If Microsoft could develop ARM version of Office in secrecy for the Surface launch, it would not give sufficient possibilities for Office competitors to do the same.
As far as I understand it, the OS is the main selling point of Macs and a substantial change in the user experience will probably alienate their core user base.
Apple knows why the Mac is popular with technical people. They're not going to f*ck that up. I know this bugaboo of "they're going to turn the Mac into an iPad" comes up every so often, but I really see zero evidence of that.
If Apple wants to unify iOS and MacOS a common chip architecture doesn’t really help them do that.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I understand the worry, but it just doesn’t make sense.
They might allow and support macOS running on iPads, though.
They shouldn’t have left this topic alone!
In the US 1/4 of developers surveyed on StackOverflow use macOS.
If they all switch to ARM and AWS will sell them Gravitron instances for a 40% discount, in what world are Intel data centers going to be necessary in the long term future?
Intel should be absolutely terrified.
If, like rumored, they are switching their pro line to ARM that will impact two groups of big spending customers (i.e. people actually spending many thousands of $ on hardware regularly):
1) Developers buying maxed out pro laptops for running IDEs, Docker, etc. I'm one of those.
2) Creatives using Adobe and other third party tool providers for 3D graphics, movies, photography, etc. This stuff is critical to their workflow and any hint of compatibility or performance issues will cause people in this segment to start considering other platforms or delaying purchasing decisions. I know people that bought the Mac Pro just before it was renewed because they needed it and there wasn't really anything else to buy for them that met their requirements even though it was 3 years out of date by then.
These segments are the ones where switching CPU architecture will hurt the most until such time that the tool ecosystem catches up. E.g. Adobe would have a lot of tools that probably will need quite a bit of work to run smoothly on ARM. It will be interesting to see how long that takes. The last few times Apple switched CPU architecture, it took Adobe a bit of time to switch and it provided an opportunity to MS, which was able to run Adobe's latest and greatest throughout the transition. And emulation is probably not going to be good enough here.
I'm a backend developer and the sole reason I'm still on a Mac is convenience. At this point it's neither the fastest nor the cheapest option. And, I can trivially get everything I use running on Linux or Windows (with the linux subsystem). Most of the stuff I use is OSS, cross platform (IDEs, command line tooling) & dockerized (databases, web servers, search engines, middleware, etc.).
All of that is x86 currently. Theoretically, ARM variants of the stuff I use could be created but in practice, this stuff does not yet exist or is kind of poorly supported/an afterthought at best.
Maybe, emulation of this stuff will be good enough. But still, I'm deploying on x86 and will be likely to want to test on that for the foreseeable future and not run different containers locally than in production. So, my workflow slowing down because of emulation is kind of a big deal for me.
So, (not so) hypothetically if I were to buy a new laptop right now, I'd be looking for something that supports my workflow going forward and that increasingly looks like either using Windows with the Linux subsystem or Linux (Ubuntu is pretty nice these days). Intel macs are still fine of course but not if there's this Apple will drop support in a hurry thing looming over it. I buy laptops with a 4-5 year useful life and Apple losing interest in anything Intel worries me when I'm going to be spending 3-4K on hardware.
The opportunities are also obvious: gaming & VR have so far not happened in the Apple ecosystem and I suspect a big part of the reason is Apple wanting to have their own hardware when they launch this stuff without dependencies on the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc.
Also data centers eventually switching to ARM is something that is technically already a bit overdue. At this point most linux software should just compile and run on ARM. Mostly it's just market inertia. Data center supply lines just tend to be dominated by AMD & Intel and developers just happen to run x86 hardware.
So, long term this is definitely a smart move for Apple and I suspect they want to get this over with sooner rather than later. However, they do have their highend users to protect. A mac pro without Intel architecture would be a hard sell in the current market.
Unless of course they really nail high performance X86 emulation. I could see them dedicating a few extra cores to that.
Adobe has been pushing hard to get 'real' versions of all their apps on iOS. LR on my iPad Pro often runs better than LR on my 2017 MBP for example. Adobe has also been pushing transitioning to cloud subscriptions so users are less likely to be stuck on old versions.
My guess is that Adobe is better positioned for a transition than they ever have been in the past.
If I drag a video file from my desktop into Premier then I'm actually working with that video file. If I open a video file in an iPad video editing app then most of the time that video file is then transcoded to H264 so the hardware acceleration can make it actually usable. Therefore adding a layer of compression.
It's not the real file anymore.
The ability to target iOS, ipadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS seamlessly is going to be a game changer.
Adobe is a lot more "cloud" nowadays (see: Fusion 360).
I would be stunned if there isn't an ARM cloud Photoshop ready to roll.
Yes, this is going to hose over the people who stopped buying Photoshop once Adobe went subscription.
I would be stunned if Adobe was developing new ARM anything and not just working on webtech versions of their suite.
Figma has proven that it's more and more possible each year and as soon as someone gets it right for Photoshop/Illustrator etc then they'll eat Adobe's lunch.
Otherwise I can't see the benefit in lower power CPUs for macs. If they really cared so much about reducing power usage and heat, then they wouldn't have shoehorned an i9 into their laptops
We’ll have to wait until 10PDT today and see the points that are brought up in the keynote.
OTOH, they're having GREAT success with their ARM chips in mobile.
So, you know, you do the math.
AMD chips are better than ever, throw a curve-ball and adopt them, please don't pick the weird mutant-mobile processor to seriously put in desktops Apple
Not sure what is weird about 64 bit ARM architecture - it certainly doesn't have the legacy (dating back to 8086 in 1978) that x86 carries with it.
It's funny how no-one has been able to dethrone x86 despite decades of effort from industry rivals and even Intel itself with iAPX and then Itanium.
I’d be happy to be wrong here, that’s just my understanding.
What would be the benefits for developers especially of ARM? (Will the likes of Numpy run more efficiently? Rust compile faster?) I know the the iPhones and iPad’s have surprisingly powerful chips in them, but (as an example), the new AMD chips are amazing, and they at least won’t break my dependencies wholesale.
While the cross-compiling pipeline already exists with Xcode where you code your iOS (ARM) stuff on macOS (Intel).
AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, NXP...etc. all use TSMC.
The issue with A series has always been yield because they are so massive.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
In the comments I read some really big numbers regarding the Mac dominance, can this be caused by a bias (country + income)? In this data OSx seems to be under 9%.
Please don't downvote me for questioning Mac dominance.
After a few more tries, I gave up. I occasionally used Windows since then through a VM in order to access something specifically, but these days there's nothing left on Windows that I need to use. Office on MacOS is good enough for the light use I put it to. VS Code / JetBrains tools have replaced Visual Studio.
There's no reason for me to use Linux as a desktop vs MacOS. I build Docker containers that run Linux, but that works fine from / in MacOS.
Via a Linux VM
AMD is fast now but if history repeats we'll wait another 15 years before anything good happens.
And frankly why would you care what brand is your processor as long as it's fast enough ?
I think getting developers on ARM might just be what eats X86 on the server.
While ARM is not perfect, it does allow companies like Apple more control over the secretive firmware that boots these chips.
To reduce that attack surface, Mac computers run a custom ME firmware from which the majority of components have been removed. … The primary use of the ME is audio and video copyright protection on Mac computers that have only Intel-based graphics.
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/seced055bcf6/...
Both AMD and ARM have something similar to Intel's ME. Let's not pretend this is by accident.
Alternatively, if you want to write your own TrustZone (for example on a RockChip CPU), you are free to write it and use it.
You can not run any firmware on an Intel or AMD chip that has not been signed by Intel ir AMD. All signed Intel firmware contains the Intel ME backdoor.
1. https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-process...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment
It would make sense they want complete control over their hardware stack end to end. You can even see this in the Apple Secure Enclave on mobile, which was made possible due to their ability to customise their own ARM chips.
If you look at smartphones, you always notice how much memory apps require. It's not a secret. It's odd that nobody seems to mention this.
Anyways, Wirth's law is relevant again. Nobody wants to hear it, but I really believe a new era of lightweight software will soon begin. I put a lot of hope in WASM, and I hope it will work well on smartphones.
I'm using tinder on a 3 year old android, and everyday it's slower and slower.
It's almost like software companies and hardware vendors have the opposite interests. Software wants to be faster, but hardware vendors wants to increase their margin, so they want software to be slower or be more feature-rich.
The RISC-V people have done a few while developing their RVC (compressed instructions) extension; see for instance slide 16 of https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/riscv-compresse... which shows, on 64-bit, x86-64 (CISC) being slightly bigger than ARMv8 (RISC), and on 32-bit, x86 (CISC) being much bigger than ARM Thumb2 (RISC). The main reason is that the encoding of x86 instructions is not very efficient, with rare instructions having shorter encodings than common instructions; an infamous example being the "ASCII adjust" single-byte instructions which nobody uses.
There's already have a fairly powerful ARM chip in all Apple computers - the T2 chip. Assuming it's a similar spec to the iPad Pro's A12 then Apple could start by moving the OS to the T2 chip, which should improve the battery life of all recent macs.
They'll come up with a fancy marketing term for apps that have been compiled for ARM and advertise them as having improved performance and battery life, thereby putting pressure on developers to update. The X86's will initially be removed from all non-pro devices and replaced with more powerful ARM chips, and once there's enough momentum and support they'll also be removed from the pro devices in a year or two.