Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
theverge.com
theverge.com
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; Intel’s thrashing has cost them at least two significant update cycles on the macbook line in the last six years. Search this fine site for complaints about how new mac laptops don’t have real performance benefits over old ones —- those complaints are 100% down to being saddled with Intel.
Apple has a functional corporate culture that ships; adding complete control of the hardware stack in is going to make for better products, full stop.
Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for their mac systems. They are going to be able to put this margin back into a combination of profit and tech budget as they choose. Early days they are likely to plow all this back into performance, a win for consumers.
So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance. You’re not going to want an Intel mac even as of January of 2021, unless you have a very unusual set of requirements.
I think they may also start making a real push on the ML side in the next year, which will be very interesting; it’s exciting to imagine what Apple’s fully vertically integrated company could do controlling hardware, OS and ML stack.
One interesting question I think is outstanding - from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized, vs AMD64. I’m not highly conversant with ARM linux, but in my mind I imagine it’s still largely a second class citizen — I wonder if systems developers will get on board, deal with slower / higher battery draw intel virtualization, or move on from Apple.
Languages like Go with supremely simple cross architecture support might get a boost here. Rust seems behind on ARM, for instance; I bet that will change in the next year or two. I don’t imagine that developing Intel server binaries on an ARM laptop with Rust will be pleasant.
Eh? This is a flimsy claim. AMD's performance/watt is extremely impressive right now. Apple is ahead of Intel for sure, but Intel isn't the only other player here.
> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. Alternately a Macbook Air type with 16 hours plus strong 4k performance.
A slightly more efficient CPU doesn't get you this. You need significant efficiency improvements across a variety of aspects, including those Apple has already been optimizing for years like the display.
The real problem though, is that apple is actually designing a core 100% focused on the target market. Unlike intel, for whatever reason, and AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops.
So, I would expect the engineering tradeoffs for said laptop/desktop processor to show. AKA, things like hyperthreading are quite a win for servers, but at best are a wash for a desktop use case focused on extremely high single thread perf at the expense of throughput.
Given the extremely impressive performance of the 4800H notebook cpus, I'd assume that might be a thing of the past.
> AKA, things like hyperthreading are quite a win for servers, but at best are a wash for a desktop use case focused on extremely high single thread perf at the expense of throughput.
This might be true for devices like the MacBook Air which are designed for relatively light usage like Office, but I don't see that argument working with their "Pro" lineup, including the iMac Pro and the MacBook Pro. These are devices specifically targeted to a professional audience like graphics designers, 3d artists, software developers or video editors. All of those tasks can be done with decent single-threaded performance, but lots of those tasks also benefit from multithreading. I haven't owned a single MacBook so far and I doubt that'll change anytime soon. Nevertheless, its exciting to see Apple do this move and it'll be interesting how good their CPUs can compare to mobile processors by Intel and AMD.
The TDP on those is, what, 3-4x the A12Z?
So ~2-3x the TDP for 2x the core count and 4x the thread count. Pretty interesting head to head when the Apple dev kits actually show up in people's hands, don't you think?
That's either 4-5W per core or the uncore in an A13 is hugely power hungry. I'm rather positive it's not an extremely bad uncore, so the only other option here is a 4-5w per core power figure. Which also lines up with the voltage/frequency curve numbers: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve.png
If you have data to support a different number I'm all ears, finding power draw figures in this space is rather difficult, but 4-5W per-core aligns with expectations here. A 1W consumption would be unheard of levels of good.
Intel TDP doesn’t include the power usage of DRAM and other IO, or the screen, or WiFi or modem (which may have been disabled tbf).
Geekbench 5 multi core scores are roughly 7400 vs 3300. Let’s say for example that the Thunder cores are half the perf of the Lightning ones. So that 3300 score might be roughly the perf you could get from 4 x Lightning instead of 2 x Lightning and 4 x Thunder. 4800H has 8 cores. Getting a bit over 2x the performance.
But that’s at a TDP of 45W (let’s call it 40W to be more generous). 5W for A13 (well, A13 entire device) vs 40W 4800H. That’s 8x the power draw for 2x performance. Am I wrong?
First of all, TDP is not the same thing as power consumption - it is a specification for the required performance of the heatsink/fan cooling solution.
For example: a Ryzen 3900X is a 105W TDP chip. Running at full speed on all 12 cores it consumes 146W; about 10W per core and the remainder for the rest of the package.
Secondly, it is entirely typical to run a single-threaded workload at a higher clock frequency (because if that's all you have to do, why not?), and chasing higher clock speeds is disproportionately expensive since it requires higher voltages, and dynamic power in a switching system increases with the square of voltage.
Again, taking the Ryzen 3900X: that's a nominal 3.8GHz processor. Running a single-threaded workload, it will typically boost up to 4.45GHz in testing. At that frequency, that single core is drawing nearly 18W - i.e. 80% more than at the nominal frequency achieved when all cores are busy and no boost headroom is available.
From what I've read about the A12/A13, the voltage/clock curves are particularly skewed at maximum clock speeds - something like 1.1V at 2.49GHz on the A12 and well under 0.8V at 2.3GHz - basically half the power to run at 93% of the clock speed.
There are a lot of unknowns here, but I think there are more reasons for optimism than your analysis suggests.
Most of those tasks benefit from multiple processors. Multithreading is less clear-cut because you're trading the win for under-optimized code against increased pressure on shared resources (which is one of the reasons why it's opened some windows for security attacks). It's not hard to find pro workloads which perform better without multithreading enabled and considering that Apple will own the entire stack up to some of the most demanding apps they're well positioned to have both solid data on the tradeoffs and architectural changes.
I'm having trouble following the reasoning.
> AMD which didn't have the funds to run a dedicated design team for laptop/desktops.
They have plenty of funds for R&D. Problem is, processor manufacture goes much beyond the processors themselves. You have to design the entire manufacturing chain, and spend billions on new foundries which will get obsolete in a few years.
And the game consoles show that AMD can put together a secure, x86 chip at high volumes at leading nodes.
AMD represents about 2/9 in Windows and 3/10 in Linux of processors using Steam month-by-month and raising; In this same survey Windows represents 95% and MacOS 4% of computers.https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/
I think they can manage the production to provide for all Apple CPU needs.
The A12 will pull around 4w on a single-core workload to come close to 9900K in performance. That's a good number, but it's not unheard of. The 4800HS is also a 4w per core CPU, and also comes close to the 9900K in performance.
The problem is increasing single-core performance becomes non-linear. It's not just a few more watts to bump from 3ghz to 4ghz. It's a lot of watts.
Simply having 4 big cores on an A12 would push it into 10w actively cooled territory as well, same as the i5 in a macbook air (a CPU that's also 10w). Add a few watts to bump the single core performance while you're at it and suddenly it's a 20w chip. Make it 8-cores to compete with the current macbook pro CPUs and suddenly it's a 40w chip.
The A12X/A12Z already has 4 big cores (and 4 little cores, and 7-8 GPU cores). I imagine the A14X will follow this pattern, but the cores will be 2 generations newer, with 2 generations of performance-per-watt improvements.
This isn't unique to Apple, either. The "big" cores in ARM CPUs have been pulling 2-4W for years and years. That's why thermal throttling is such a major issue in mobile, especially mobile games.
Hence it makes much more sense to treat the A series processors as 2 watt chips when looking at multi-core scores. They're targeting efficiently hitting these lower frequencies. You'll get a similar result for the 4800HS; it'll use a lot more than 4 W single-core.
The problem here is a severe lack of quality data. The best we have right now is SPEC2006 which is unfortunately only single core. You're absolutely right that it makes more sense to compare like for like in workloads, but we don't have any good multithreaded cross-platform benchmarks. There's geekbench, but it's somewhere between mediocre and shitty. And then nothing else? There's then no multithreaded benchmarks that also have measured power draw on an A12/A13.
A 4800HS at it's 4w/core all core load is also still clocking higher than an A12X. When Apple has the thermal budget to spend as well they'd almost certainly do the same thing?
> A 4800HS at it's 4w/core all core load is also still clocking higher than an A12X.
This doesn't mean that much, since the range of efficient clock speeds depends on design choices, so they aren't always 1:1 comparable between architectures. Apple might well increase clock speed on their desktop chips, but unless it's only a few percent, it won't be as simple as pumping more power into the same dies; they have to actually redesign the core to operate efficiently at those higher speeds.
> AMD’s
> that‘s
What is your method of input where you use three different characters for apostrophes?
>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...
Apple has been hitting it out of the park lately.
Anandtech would like to disagree with your word choice.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...
> In virtually all of the SPECint2006 tests, Apple has gone and increased the peak power draw of the A13 SoC; and so in many cases we’re almost 1W above the A12. Here at peak performance it seems the power increase was greater than the performance increase, and that’s why in almost all workloads the A13 ends up as less efficient than the A12.
> The total power use is quite alarming here, as we’re exceeding 5W for many workloads. In 470.lbm the chip went even higher, averaging 6.27W. If I had not been actively cooling the phone and purposefully attempting it not to throttle, it would be impossible for the chip to maintain this performance for prolonged periods.
In other words, to get those good specint numbers, power was sacrificed to do it. 5W per-core power draw is right in line with a typical x86 laptop CPU, too. 4800HS sits at 35w, or 4.3w per core.
Here's the A12's power/frequency curve: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/a12-fvcurve.png
That's the curve per core (that's how those charts work). 3.85W per core @ 2.5ghz is what a big core A12 is spec'd at.
> 4x the perf/watt of Intel and AMD competitors in Geekbench
Geekbench only measures perf, not perf/watt. It does not try to achieve maximum perf/watt, nor has Apple tuned to the A12/A13 to achieve maximum perf/watt in Geekbench either. Geekbench's single thread numbers where it "competes with Intel & AMD" are also these ~5W per core power figures.
I'm not sure where you're getting this random 4x better number from anyway?
I'd expect a 2020 A14X or whatever it's called to comfortably beat what they could achieve in 2018, so getting 4-5x the perf/watt of Intel and AMD's best is what I'd expect when operating at similar points in the frequency/power curve. The A12X was around 4-5x the perf/watt of what Intel and AMD had out in late 2018.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2639065 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2638528
The chip needs around 25W at 2.5GHz and 200W at 4.7GHz. 8x more power for 1.88 times the performance. In other words Intel chips running at 2.5GHz are 4.25 times more efficient than Intel chips running at 4.7Ghz. No magic. Once Apple has chips that go this far they will suffer from the same problems.
Here is a slightly newer chart [1] that demonstrates a 57% increase in power consumption for a 500Mhz frequency gain (12% performance gain).
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Clock...
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/power...
While similar curves also apply to Intel and AMD, their mobile parts are drawing 10-20 watts per core to acheive the very top results. When you're using all the cores together under a 6W TDP (as apple is doing), Apple is able to achieve a much higher Geekbench result than Intel or AMD parts set to a comparable TDP, or even 3x the TDP. Compare multi-core Geekbench scores of Apple's parts running at a 6W TDP to Intel or AMD's most efficient parts running at a 15W TDP, and you'll see that Apple outperforms them while drawing 1/3 the power. Similar curves apply, but Apple can achieve far morea at 1W per core than any x86 competitors.
For example. Geekbench measures peak performance of all cores at the same time and the power draw may go above 5W.
The 5W TDP may refer to normal day to day use where one or two cores are active at the same time for the duration of the user interaction (play a game for 5 min or something) and once the user stops using the phone it will quickly go back to a lower TDP.
Increase frequency by 30% and the A12 will also be hitting 10 watts per core - the end of that graph is going real vertical real fast.
Since Zen 2 and A12/A13 are all on the same TSMC process this shouldn't be that surprising...
> I expect at least a 50% per core performance increase
Based off of what evidence? That'd be an unheard of improvement. TSMC isn't even claiming anything close to that at a pure transitor switching frequency for 5nm? They are predicting 15% frequency gain (at the same complexity and power) or a 20% power reduction (at the same frequency and complexity) over their 7nm process.
My intuition is that 50% might be overoptimistic. But going from iPad to Laptop thermal constraints, you'd expect a big increase in frequency just from clocking the thing higher, no?
Presumably that would only apply when the cores are actually running at full-throttle though. For casual use there could still be considerable gains if the processors are better at power management (which they most likely are, as they've had to hyper-optimised for this for phones).
So a A14x+ (15 W+)
30% frequency increase vs A13, because of higher TDP +
10% IPC increase (larger caches, design tweaks) +
15% Frequency increase, due to 5 nm.
A i7-1065G7 costs Apple something like $400. The A13 costs something like $60 to manufacture. Apple is highly motivated.
"But the biggest surprises and largest performance increases were to be found in the A13's GPU. Where the new chip really shines and exceeds Apple’s own marketing claims is in the sustained performance and efficiency of the new GPU. Particularly the iPhone 11 Pro models were able to showcase much improved long-term performance results, all while keeping thermals in check. The short version of it is that Apple has been able to knock it out of the park, delivering performance increases that we hadn’t expected in what's essentially a mid-generation refresh on the chip manufacturing side of matters."
One of the key phrases is "...Apple has been able to knock it out of the park..."
The rest of the article is pretty clear - Apple gets it, and beats their competitors pretty soundly.
I think that's only part of the story, which also needs to include the ability to add features and control the entire feature set across chips on all of their devices.
Encryption, ML, graphics, power management, security, etc. are all things that Apple can now add or remove as needed.
The level of optimization they can do is now well beyond just speed and price.
I saw speculation elsewhere that this change, along with AWS's addition of Graviton-based (their own ARM processors) instances at much more competitive price points relative to x86, are bound to spearhead the change to "ARM by default."
If your devs are already using ARM, and ARM's notably cheaper in the cloud, that's a compelling case. If you're already using Kubernetes / Docker heavily, you're probably already 80% of the way there. Linuxes that aren't supporting ARM as a "first class citizen" will soon, and undoubtedly that will be a speed bump at worst.
I'm interested to see the specs relative to the x86 Macs, but the only open question to me was whether or not we'd see the x86 emulation layer. Well, we did, and it may not be perfect but it certainly looks like they put a lot of effort into it. If it works as well as it looks, I think this transition is borderline inevitable. I think I've bought my last x86 hardware.
But otherwise as a developer-focused example the 32-core Epyc Rome compiles Build2 faster than the 64-core Graviton 2: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=2006047-PTS-EPYC2EC...
That's going to matter when a company is spec'ing out workstations to buy, which are unlikely to have an Apple option on the table at all in the first place, and Amazon isn't going to sell you Graviton2 CPUs to put under your desk, either.
This _could_ be the start of a bigger focus on ARM, definitely, but to really make inroads into what devs use you'll need someone other than Apple to step up to the plate. Or for Apple to become vastly larger than they are in the desktop space. Otherwise we'll all just keep cross-compiling like we have been for the last decade of mobile app development.
However, there is a real challenge here and that's who has the capability and incentives to make laptop and desktop Arm cores. Microsoft probably, but hard to see many other firms doing so.
So a scenario where Apple gains a material lead in desktop and laptop performance over everyone else and grows market share as a result seems quite credible.
How does hyperthreading change the story here? The 32-core CPU is the one that had hyperthreading while the 64-core one didn't. Hypthreading is widely regarded as being around +20% performance for multithreading-friendly workloads. Either way, the per-core performance of the 32-core x86 CPU is nearly 2x that of the 64-core ARM one. That's not a good look for being desktop-viable.
Especially when the 32-core x86 cpu also comes in a 64-core variant. And then a 2P 64-core variant even. You can have double the CPU cores that are each 2x faster than the Graviton 2 CPU cores.
Which gets back to only Apple has managed to get ARM to have good per-core performance so far.
> Plus Graviton seems to be materially more cost effective.
The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.
Just can't agree though that only Apple has the ability to make desktop / server Arm parts that don't have 'terrible' per core performance. The real issue is who has the economic incentive to build competitive desktop parts - I don't see anyone who would see it as worthwhile.
> The c5a.16xlarge is the same price as the m6g.16xlarge. No cost effective difference in that head-to-head.
c6g.16xlarge is more than 10% cheaper than m6g.16xlarge (and c5a.16xlarge). It also provides more EBS and network bandwidth, and provides 64 cores versus 32 cores with SMT.
https://ec2instances.info/?region=us-west-2&compare_on=true&...
It'll be interesting to see how fast improvements are made in both Apple's and AWS's processors. That's another factor I see contributing to this: if Apple's pace of processor improvements continues as it has for iPhone and iPad, it'll be tougher year after year for competitors to stick with the status quo.
More cores will help your typical developer who's running 8+ apps at once, along with several browser tabs that are all running in separate processes.
This definitely makes my computer run slowish (esp. Android Studio!). Of course I can shut things down and run fewer things at once, but it would definitely provide value to me not to have to.
Current hypervisor.framework is a very thin wrapper over Intel's virtualization extensions, so t'll have to change pretty heavily to accommodate ARM.
I predict they'll have the same battery life. Any savings will be used to reduce the battery size.
IMO ARM linux is great, the real thing lacking is good hardware to run it.
(Unless you're speaking almost entirely of webapps, which mostly run fine even on the measly 1.5 GHz 4-core Pi ARM processor.)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi...
I think some worries are warranted.
But yes, most models are trained on NVIDIA GPUs that are deep learning. All of the other model types can already be trained on regular CPUs.
There is no guarantee that a phone-scale CPU can just become 4x faster by 4x'ing the power/TDP/die area. If it were that easy, Intel would already have done it (and no, the x86 architecture isn't so terribly inefficient that they are leaving triple-digit percentage improvements on the table).
What I expect we'll see are ARM chips that are power and performance competitive with x86 chips only for specific curated use cases. Apple will extract an advantage by putting custom hardware acceleration into them, to cater for those specific tasks. They will not be able to achieve general purpose performance improvements wildly beyond what Intel can already do.
This is how the current iDevices achieve their excellent performance and battery life. Not through raw general-purpose CPU horsepower, but by a finely tuned synergy between hardware and software. Apple are taking their desktop down the same route. This will be the ultimate competitive advantage for their own software - they will be able to move key software components into hardware, and make it look like magic. But as a developer, you won't be able to participate in this unless you target Apple-blessed hardware instructions/APIs. Your Python script isn't going to start running 4x faster unless you can convince Apple to implement its inner loop in custom silicon.
I have no doubt that Apple will be leaning hard into ASIC territory as they build out their new CPUs. The endgame? Every software function you need, baked into perfectly optimised silicon by the monovendor.
I guess AMD is fine for me (as is my old Intel-notebook) and I'll just wait for POVray, GROMACS and Co.
EDIT: And well, I noticed, supposedly Anandtech ran SPECint2006 on the A13 (and numerous other chips) - they ran it with WSL for x86 (because running on a dozen Android things is easier than running a standard benchmark on Linux/Windows ofc). You find the results here: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14892/spec2006-global-over... - I guess (not sure, because it's for some reason not cleary marked and mentioned...) these are SPECint2006-results. So, let's check them for validity (because WSL is no problem and it matches Linux ofc); just looking at an i7-6700K (which is a little bit behind the i9-9900K they supposedly ran on): https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2016q1/cpu2006-20160... - marginal worse performance than @anandtech in some benchmarks, but that's with an older CPU and an older arch! And then there are the 3 or 4 benchmarks which are just way off. Makes one wonder, what they really did (because of course, installing CentOS and running SPEC on native Linux is too much of a hassle, when running and compiling on 8 ARM-platforms!?)
EDITEDIT: it's even worse for SPECfp2006: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2016q1/cpu2006-20160... [well, here the old 6700K suddenly sometimes is twice as fast as the 9900K and 3x as fast as the A13 (and yeah the story of the 2.8GHz-low-power-chip drawing circles around a 4.5GHz-HF-part just didn't sound convincing in the first place...)]
Andrei mentions this here: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=187314&curpost...
And some other things which are bugging me:
- can you only optimize for A53 on Android with the big.LITTLE-configurations (they do!)?
- so they cross-compiled an AMD64-producing gcc 3.2 with Xcode 10 on MacOS-X for ARM? impressive.
I’d be interested in estimates of how much hand-written AVX/SSE your computer actually runs. The apps I’ve seen usually have a fairly small core of AVX/SSE code.
The memory model differences are going to be painful to debug, I think ("all-the-world's-a-VAX syndrome" is now "all the world's a Pentium/x86-64").
In an even more niche area (high-end VFX apps, like compositors, renderers) SSE/AVX intrinsics are used quite a bit in performance-critical parts of the code, and auto-vectorisers can't yet do as good a job (they're pretty useless at conditionals and masking).
(Semi-seriously, I don't know anyone who uses a Unix(-like) system who uses 7zip, although I'm sure they're out there. For the record, I just unzipped a 120M archive on both my 2020 Core i7 MacBook Air and my 2018 (last-gen) iPad Pro and as near as I can tell the iPad was faster actually extracting the files, but had an extra second or so of overhead from the UI.)
7zip is an implementation of LZMA, like xz. So, different names and file format details, but essentially the same algorithm.
Linux distributions have been using xz compression for all packages (replacing gzip). So to the question of how relevant is xz/lzma/7zip performance to day to day task, is it's a lot relevant.
The successor will probably be zstd in the coming years. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-3...
>> "As fast" on specific curated use cases. Show me an Apple chip that beats any laptop on 7zip.
> Is this a joke, what kind of usage benchmark is 7zipping large numbers of files?
A benchmark that Apple is unlikely to have implemented specific optimizations for, which therefore is a better test of the general purpose performance of the chip.
The situation being claimed here is sort of like if someone cited a DES benchmark to claim that Deep Crack's DES cracking chips (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker) were faster than a contemporary 1998 Pentium II.
If true, that's just a nitpick that doesn't affect the overall point of the GGGP, though.
edit: Just tried compressing a large file, ultra setting on my desktop i5 CPU, it's running at 3 MB/s on 1 core.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/12/ipad-pro-vs-macbook-air...
I read about a chip that had that feature yesterday but I can’t find the link unfortunately.
Sorry but there is no justification for this. With the same thermal constraints there is every expectation that an Apple / Arm CPU would be more performant and efficient than a comparable x86. Why? Because aarch64 doesn't have the historical legacy that x86 has and Apple has already shown what they can do in the iPad etc. Sure they won't be triple digits but it will enough to be noticeable.
And, as you say, they will have the advantage of Apple's custom silicon for specific use cases. So best of both worlds.
And the CISC vs RISC arguments are questionable, seeing that Apple has done the migration in both directions by now.
Intel tried to compete in mobile for a long time and failed even with a better manufacturing process.
Modern x86_64 processors don't actually natively execute x86 instructions, they translate them into the instructions the hardware actually uses. The percentage of the die required to do that translation is small and immaterial.
> Intel tried to compete in mobile for a long time and failed even with a better manufacturing process.
Intel didn't understand the market.
I recently bought a new phone. On paper it's twice as fast as my old phone. I imagine that's true but I can't tell any difference. Everything was sufficiently fast before and it still is. I never use my phone to do anything that needs an actually-fast CPU. I have no reason to pay additional money for a faster phone CPU. But I do notice how often I have to charge the battery.
These are not atypical purchasing criteria for mobile devices, but that's not the market Intel was chasing with their designs and pricing, so they failed. It's not because they couldn't make an x86 CPU for that market, it's because they didn't want to, because it's a lower margin commodity market.
They didn't fail because of performance, though, they failed because of app support & lack of a quality radio. The CPU performance & efficiency itself was otherwise fine. It wasn't always chart-topping good, but it wasn't bad either.
General point is that I think that Arm has a small architectural advantage due to lack of cruft but that other factors are usually more important - e.g. the resources and quality of team behind implementation.
Heck, I'm happy with 1 hour. I leave my laptop plugged in nearly 100% of the time. The point of the laptop is that it's easy to move, not that I want to use it while I'm in transit.
Agreed that CISC vs RISC is very questionable by now.
It seems most people feel that the DEC Alpha went too far in weakening the memory model to improve performance, but A64 seems to at least be near the sweet spot.
It's also not a huge amount of work that gets thrown away decoding x86 instructions in parallel, but there's non-zero overhead introduced by having the start location of the next instruction depend on what the current instruction is.
- Emphasise the breadth of their silicon expertise across CPU / GPU / Neural Engines etc. - Because Arm has little or no brand recognition (Apple > Intel > Arm in branding terms). - Distinguish from any me-too moves to Arm by competitors.
The absence of any ARM mention is marketing, nothing more.
E.g., a nice article from 2010: https://nofilmschool.com/2010/07/apple-snubs-adobe-again-wit...
[1]https://www.top500.org/news/japan-captures-top500-crown-arm-... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601098
iDevices weren't really made with games in mind, but they can push out performance that beats handheld gaming devices. Artists (including myself) use iPads extensively and the response time with the Apple Pencil beats out just about anything else on the market. The only limiting factor is the tiny memory that limits the file size and layer limit on some programs. They're just fine for watching video, and even multitasking with a video playing while working on something else. This is on tiny device with no active cooling and long battery life, beating out most laptops in the same price range.
I don't believe there is any curated use case. They're already more than capable of being general purpose computers. I mean, Apple is already openly advertising that they're making iPad OS more desktop-like and operable with mice and keyboards. Literally the only things holding them back are the OS and Apple's refusal to put some decent memory inside.
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 gains [1]. Not one thing that they demoed requires any meaningful CPU power.
Similarly, while ARM parts are more efficient than x86 per compute cycle, it's not a dramatic change.
The big changes, I think, are more mundane:
- Apple is going to save $200-$800 cost per Mac shipped
- Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML cores and accelerators. They will probably put that stuff in T2 for Intel Macs. If they're already shipping T2 on every machine, with a bunch of CPU cores, why not just make those CPU cores big enough for the main workload?
Doubling CPU perf is meaningless if you can ship the right accelerators that'll do 100x energy/perf for video compression, crypto and graphics.
[1] for a regular web browsing type user; obviously if you're compiling stuff this may not apply; if that is true you're almost certainly better off just getting a Linux desktop for the heavy lifting
Whom is Apple going to sell binned A14s to?
Where does everyone think margin comes from in the chip business?
In theory they could offer the Mini with eighteen different CPU options, but that's not really their style.
The silicon team is going to be very busy: they've got the A-series, S-series, T-series, H-series, W-series, and U-series chips to pump out on a regular roadmap.
The A-series (CPU / GPU / Neural accelerator) is the major work. It gets an annual revision, which probably means at least two teams in parallel?
The A-series X and Z variants seem to be kicked out roughly every second A-series generation, and power the iPads. The S-series seems to get a roughly annual revision, but it's a much smaller change than the main A-series.
I could see the Mac chips on a 2-year cycle, perhaps alternating with the iPad, or perhaps even trailing the iPads by 6 months?
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2520?vs=2584
The 3990X costs more than ten times as much as the 3700X. It has eight times more cores. On anything threaded it smashes the 3700X. On anything not threaded it... doesn't. In many cases it loses slightly because the turbo clock is lower.
It basically means that the processor with the best single thread performance is somewhere in the lower half of your lineup and everything above it is just more chiplets with more cores. That's perfectly reasonable for servers and high end workstations that scale with threads. I'm not sure how interesting it is for laptops. Notice that AMD's laptop processors don't use chiplets.
On the whole my guess would be that we have the iPad Pro and MacBook Air using the same SoC, the MacBook Pro doing… something (it'll still need integrated graphics, but do they really sell enough to justify a new die? OTOH they do make a die specifically for the iPad Pro, and I'd guess it's lowest-selling iOS device v. highest-selling macOS device, and idk how numbers compare!), and the iMac (Pro)/Mac Pro using chiplets.
Of course, yield is still a physical constraint, but apple sells a wide range of products and shouldn't have any trouble finding homes for defect-ridden chips.
If you check technical specifications on past MBP battery specification and battery life you can notice one thing: Watt/hour battery is always decreasing and battery life is always remaining constant (e.g., 10 hours of web scrolling).
Gain in power consumption allows to reduce component space which allows further slimmer designs.
This isn't always true. The 16" MacBook Pro, for example, has a 100 Wh battery, which is the largest that Apple has ever shipped in a laptop. This is the largest battery size permitted in cabin baggage on flights.
A wireless solution is long-awaited.
They got pretty dramatic results from the first few options, but it topped out at the thermal pads and nothing else made any difference at all. Their conclusion was that the way the system was built, there was an upper limit on the power the system could consistently provide to the CPU, and no amount of cooling would make any difference after that point.
The obvious conclusion for me was that Apple made decisions based on battery life and worked backwards from there, choosing a chip that fell within the desired range, designing a cooling system that was good enough for that ballpark, and providing just enough power to the CPU/GPU package to hit the upper end of the range.
It actually good engineering to have all the components balanced. If you overbuilt the VRM's for a CPU that would never utilize the current, its just wasted cost.
OTOH, maybe they were downsizing the batteries to keep it at 10H so they could be like "look we extended the battery to 16 hours with our new chips" while also bumping the battery capacity.
We shall see...
> The 16" MacBook Pro, for example, has a 100 Wh battery, which is the largest that Apple has ever shipped in a laptop. This is the largest battery size permitted in cabin baggage on flights.
That's…pretty bad. Do you have anything else open?
They demoned lightroom and photoshop which are surely using meaningful CPU resources?
Agreed on the accelerators and the cost savings. All together probably a compelling case for switching.
This doesn't really seem to match my experience; at least on a 2015 MBP, the CPU is always consuming at least 0.5-1W, even with nothing running. If I open a webpage (or leave a site with a bunch of ads open), the CPU alone can easily start consuming 6-7 watts for a single core.
Apple claims 10 hours of battery life with a 70-something WH battery, which would indicate they expect total average power consumption to be around 7W; even the idle number is a decent percentage of that.
(Also, has anyone been able to measure the actual power consumption of the A-series CPUs?)
If anything, you should install an adblocker. A single website filled with ads (and they're all filled with tons of ads) can spin the CPU to tens of watts forever, significantly draining the battery.
Turn off animated gifs and emojis in slack.
If you run the web versions of Electron “apps” in Safari you’ll get substantially better battery life. (Of course, still not perfect; irrespective of browser all of these types of apps are incredibly poorly optimized from a client-side performance perspective.
If large companies making tools like slack had any respect for their users they would ship a dedicated desktop app, and it would support more OS features while using a small fraction of the computing resources.
(Large-company-sponsored web apps seem to be generally getting worse over time. Gmail for example uses several times more CPU/memory/bandwidth than it used to a few years ago, while simultaneously being much glitchier and laggier.)
Amen
CPU tends to be quite lean, until something needs to be done then steps up very quickly to consuming 45w.
It's quite variable, the highest brightness can consume double of the lowest brightness for example. One interesting test if one has a battery app showing instant consumption (I know lenovo laptops used to do), is to adjust brightness and see the impact.
This is sort-of-OK for consumers but amazing for Apple and its shareholers.
Greater marketshare also provides more value to shareholders meaning that shareholders still win, as do consumers.
More people with macs (and probably iPads/iPhones) would also increase other profit centers for Apple such as services (their highest profit center), warranties, and accessories. The profits and loyalty from these could easily far outweigh the $100-$300 of extra margin they might gain from keeping Mac prices the same.
Meaning that price cuts to macs might actually be more strategically beneficial (to EVERYONE) than hoarding higher margins.
This only makes sense if you know nothing about Apple's business.
You really think they're doing this to save $50 from ~5m Macs? You really think all this upheaval is for a mere $250m a year in savings? It'll cost them 10x that in pain alone to migrate to a new platform.
Come on now....$250m is nothing at Apple scale. Think bigger. Even if you hate Apple, think bigger about their nefariousness (if your view is that they have bad intentions - one I don't agree with).
Quarterly numbers come in between 4.5-5m units these days but point taken - I recalled numbers for the wrong timeframe.
> I also doubt the chips cost them 50$ per unit. The savings may worth few billions so it's not really like nothing.
The true cost of this move is reflected in more than the R&D. This is a long multi-year effort involving several parties with competing interests. People are talking here as if they just flipped a switch to save costs.
Let me make this clear. In my view, this is an offensive/strategic move to drive differentiation, not a defensive move to save costs (though if this works, that could be a big benefit down the road). Apple has a long history of these kinds of moves (that don't just involve chips). This is the same response I have to people peddling conspiracy theories that Apple loves making money off of selling dongles as a core strategy (dongles aren't the point, wireless is; focusing on dongles is missing the forest for the trees).
The question isn't whether it suits them. The question is: "Why did they choose to take on the level of risk in this portion of their business and what is the core benefit they expect?"
If the the main reason was cost savings, this would be a horrible way to go about it.
There's a better answer: Intel can't deliver the parts they need at the performance and efficiency levels Apple needs to build the products the way they want to build them. This is not a secret. There is a ton of reporting and discussion around this spanning a decade about Intel's pitfalls, disappointments, and delays. Apple might also want much closer alignment between iOS and MacOS. Their chip team has demonstrated an ability to bring chipsets in-house, delivering performance orders of magnitude better than smartphone competition on almost every metric, and doing it consistently on Apple's timelines. It only seems natural to drive a similar advantage on the Mac side while having even tighter integration with their overall Apple ecosystem.
If you want to boil this conversation into one dimension, I'm not your guy - you'd be better suited by finding someone else to talk to. Cheers!
2. I think you actually missed the point of the conversation. OP said "that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted" and followed that up with "amazing for Apple and its shareholers."
It is not insane at all. And not amazing. It just comes off as naive to anyone who's worked in these kinds of organizations and been involved in similar decisions.
I think it's hard for some people to comprehend that trying to save $1b a year for its own sake at the scale of an org like Apple can in many cases be a terrible decision.
Half the fun is writing down your own thoughts!
> You came with your strawman that it was for its own sake
That's possible. I saw the emphasis placed differently than you did even though we read the same words. Probably describes the nature of many internet arguments. Happy Monday - I appreciate you pushing me to explain myself. Seems like others were able to get value out of our back and forth.
Yes, they're a big company. But they're also a mature company. A lot of their efforts are going to be boring cost-cutting measures, because that's how mature companies stay profitable.
This isn't a zero sum game. Being able to ship less expensive computers which perform better is a win for consumers and Apple shareholders at the some time.
The only loser here is Intel.
Don't we basically know that from the Surface X?
Don't have to venture that far, we know it from the iPad Pro.
I also don't believe it's reasonable to assume that switching to arm is as simple as putting an iPad cpu into a laptop shell.
Here is an estimate that their 2018 model costs 72 just to make not to design and make.
https://www.techinsights.com/blog/apple-iphone-xs-max-teardo...
The a14 that will power a MacBook is likely going to be more expensive not less. Especially with 15B transistors on the a14 vs less than 7B on a12.
Average selling price of Intel cpu looks like around $126. This includes a lot of low end cpus which is exactly the kind of cpu apple fans like to compare.
Apple may realize greater control and better battery life with the switch but they won't save a pile of money and thoughts about increasing performance are fanciful speculation that Apple, the people with the expertise are too smart to engage in.
Which means the actual per-CPU fab cost is going to become a smaller part of the complete development and production cost of a run. And that total cost is the only one that matters.
I expect savings can still be made, because Apple will stop contributing to Intel's profits. On the other hand I'm sure Apple was already buying CPUs at a sizeable discount.
Either way it's an open question if Apple's margins are going to look much healthier.
IMO an important motivation is low power/TDP for AR/VR.
Ax will also eventually give Apple the option of a single unified development model, which will allow OS-specific optimisations and improvements inside the CPU/GPU.
Ax has the potential to become MacOS/iOS/A(R)OS on a chip in a way that Intel CPUs never could.
Here’s hoping anyway!!
You are overestimating how much a CPU costs...
It also removes any need for a dedicated GPU in their high-end laptops, which is probably $200 alone.
I have no idea how they justify the prices for their lower end laptops as-is, as they have worse screen and performace than recent iPads in pretty much all cases.
This isn't "sort-of-ok", it's "bad-for-customers" and "bad-for-developers".
As a consumer you shouldn't be running unsigned software because you're putting not only your data at risk but any data you have access to.
And as a developer on mac you can still run anything reasonably well in a VM. If you're using node, you should be running that in a virtualized environment in the first place, albeit I'm too lazy myself to always set that all up.
Actually it's pretty amazing that now we'll be able to run an entire x86 OS environment on an ARM chip and get very usable performance too.
Just curious: why should node be ran in a virtualised environment for development? Is it a security concern? Does that apply to languages like python too? Would you be happy running it in a Docker container from macOS?
Thanks!
I'd say that we've moved away from virtualisation completely, we now use containers, so developers will expect native performance, as we get on other platforms.
If they're already on macOS, that's a thing.
Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.
Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both "cannibalize" their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.
While they won't be competing with Chromebooks for general education use cases, I could very well see Apple trying to upsell schools on a $599 alternative that happens to run GarageBand, iMovie, and even XCode.
While there is no digitizer, there is a keyboard and a touchpad. Also, I expect Apple is going to try to keep a gap between the base Mac and the iPad price-wise so they would add to the base storage and maybe RAM.
Then again, considering the pricing on the base iPad, maybe they will bring it down to $600.
If your phone is good enough to take care of your day to day computing, you can probably get by with an inexpensive all-in-one computer and save the headache of docking.
(And the GPU, and maybe even more RAM etc).
Then what is the point in docking at all? Now you have to keep track of what's on the dock and what's on the phone. Plus, by the time you integrate all this into a dock, you basically have something that costs as much as an inexpensive PC, so why bother?
When looking for IDEs or tooling on iOS I still have not found anything remotely professionally usable... (I mean Visual Studio + Reshaper like, not VS Code...) but perhaps somebody could enlighten me...
One problem is that people expect the CPU power of a laptop, which requires much more power and cooling than the typical tablet. As a consequence in tablet mode a Surface Book has about two hours of battery life.
Related to your example - $1 burgers are increasingly better, than you would expect. The difference between McDonald's midrange line and, say, a burger at a restaurant for $18 is negligible in flavor. I can no longer justify going to a restaurant and pay $18+tip for a burger.
Oh come on. I get that you're trying to make a point but this is ridiculous.
I’ll eat a $18 hamburger because it tastes really good - yes, about 18x better than a $1 burger.
I'd argue that the functional difference between a Honda Fit and a Tesla is less than the difference between the best McDonald's hamburger and an $18 hamburger. That's why I drive a Honda Fit. In the face of Tesla's increasing sales it would be pretty strange to assert that my taste was somehow universal.
And then we've come full circle to Apple products.
I eat at McDonald's all the time, and I also get pricey burgers ($13-18) from a local place that makes the best I've ever had.
You can't be serious. If you are, I've gotta say if anyone has a perception issue about their respective quality it's you.
I was making a point less about McDonald's being equivalent to a restaurant burger and more about people's perceptions of McDonald's and how bad it is. That is, there's probably a lot less difference in the taste of those burgers than a lot of people want to admit.
The other aspect to consider is consistency. I had a $14 burger at a restaurant on Saturday that I would have been happy to swap in any single burger I've ordered from McDonald's in the last 12 months. You may not consider it high quality at McDonald's, but you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
All I'm really doing is making a point that there's a bit of fetishism about luxury items going on these days. Are Apple devices generally higher quality than many competitors? Yes. Is the difference in quality in line with most people's perception of the difference in quality? I don't think so.
McDonald's has very high quality preparation standards. Their ingredients and techniques were constructed to facilitate their high-speed, high-consistency process, but prevent them from incorporating things that the overwhelming majority of burger consumers prefer.
For example, the extremely fine grind on the meat, the thin patty, the sweet bread, the singular cheese selection, the inability to get the patty cooked to specification, the lack of hard sear or crust and the maillardization that accompanies it, etc. etc. etc. At a minimum, people prefer juicier burgers with coarser, more loosely-packed texture, usually cooked to lower temperatures (though this depends on what part of the country you're in,) and the flavor and texture differential from a hard sear, be it on a flat top or grill, and toasted bread.
For consumers who, at least at that moment, have a use case that requires their food be cheap, fast, and available, well we know who the clear winner is.
In my new career as a software developer and designer, I use apple products. I am willing to pay for the reliable UNIXy system that can also natively run industry-standards graphics tools without futzing around with VMs and things, and do all that on great hardware. There will always be people who aren't going to compare bits pushed to dollars spent and are going to be willing to spend the extra few hundred bucks on a device they spend many hours a day interacting with.
This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
I don't doubt you know more about food. If you applied that knowledge to my actual point instead of what it appears you assumed my point was, this assertion might have been correct.
That's not entirely your fault, I was making a slightly different point than the exiting conversation was arguing, so it's easy to bring the context of that into what I was trying to say and assume they were more related than they were.
The belittling way in which you responded though, that's all on you.
> This isn't about perception at all— Apple products meet my goals in a way that other products don't. If your goals involve saving a few hundred bucks on a laptop, then don't buy one. I really don't understand why people get so mad at Apple for selling the products that they sell.
My point, applied to this, would be to question what other products you've tried? My assertion is that people perceive other products to be maybe 50%-70% as good, when in reality they are probably closer to 85%-95% as good (if not better, in rare instances). That is a gap between perception and reality.
As applied to burgers, I was saying that people that refuse to eat at McDonald's because of quality probably have a very skewed perception of the actual differences in quality in a restaurant burger compared to a McDonald's burger.
I'm fully prepared to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time. I also don't see how anything you said really applies to my point, so I don't think you've really proven I'm wrong yet.
I wasn't annoyed by you misunderstanding, I was annoyed by you misunderstanding, assuming you understood my position completely because it would more conveniently fit with your existing knowledge, and then using that assumed position to proclaim your superiority and my foolishness.
It's not about deep conversational chess on my part, it's about common decency and not assuming uncharitable positions of others by default on your part. A problem, I'll note, that you repeated in the last comment.
Just the mere perception of quality will increase your satisfaction levels. The perception of lack of quality will reduce you satisfaction levels.
Thus I still maintain that your "perfect" $18 burger is only marginally better than McDonald's midrange burger. The fact that you actually spend time on making that burger more appetising - is proof that the low cost foods are getting better and better.
While focusing on my analogy, you literally prove my overall point.
30 years ago you weren't necessary, as low cost food wasn't nearly as good as today. Now - you have to exist to justify that premium.
But $18 burger is not drastically better than McDonald's $7 burger.
Try doing an actual blind test, with a control... because the simple fact of perception will make you think one is better.
This may be the single worst analogy I've ever seen.
There is no amount of money you can pay at McDonalds to get a good quality burger.
I don't spend $18 for burgers, since there are a million places where you can pay $5-8 dollars and get a damned good piece of beef. But not at McDonalds.
I’ve eaten at McDonald’s around the world, it really depends but they do have good burgers when they’re cooked right.
$5-8? At a food truck? The ones that make burgers of an extremely varied quality?
`(development cost + (units sold * incremental cost) ) / units sold`
But a lot of Macs have higher end Intel CPUs so the per/ unit cost of Intel CPUs is pretty damned high.
And the remaining 10% would indirectly benefit benefit their iPhone cash cow in the form of keeping people inside the ecosystem.
The Mac silicon is inheriting the investments Apple made in the iPhone CPUs. This will continue. The bits which Apple invests to make their existing hardware scale to desktop and high end laptops won't benefit the iPhone much at all. On future generation chips, Apple will spread the development costs over a few more units, but since iPhone + iPad ship several times more units than the Mac, the bulk of the costs will be born by them.
One of the two scenarios (or perhaps a mixture of both) are more likely, and I lean towards #1:
1. Apple decreases the price of the Mac to stay aligned with gross margin targets. This likely has a significant upwards impact on revenue, because a drop in price like this opens new markets who can now afford a Mac, increasing market share, driving new customers to their services, and adding a layer of lock-in for iPhone-but-not-Mac customers.
2. Apple uses the additional budget per device for more expensive parts/technology. They are struggling to incorporate technologies like OLED/mini-LED because of the significant cost of these displays and this would help open up those opportunities.
Why not got the same road with an MacBook SE? I even think this will be the first product out the pipeline.
MacPro buyers usually don't want to be beta testers and will probably be the last to transition out once horsepower is clearly there with mesurable gains.
Of course you'd still get 350$ range crappy product, Apple can't and don't want to compete a those levels.
1. This is risky for consumers. Whereas the PPC->x86 move was clearly a benefit to consumers given how PPC was lagging Intel at the time, x86 had proven performance and a massive install base. It was low risk to consumers. This? Less so. Sure iOS devices run on ARM but now you lose x86 compatibility. Consumers need to be "compensated" for this risk. This means lower prices and/or better performance, at least in the short-to-medium term; and
1. This move is a risk for Apple. They could lose market share doing this if consumers reject the transition. They wouldn't undertake it if the rewards didn't justify the risk. They will ultimately capture more profit from this I'm sure but because of (1) I think they may well subsidize this move in the short term with more performance per $.
But I fully agree with an earlier comment here: Apple has a proven track record with chip shipments and schedules here so more vertically integrated laptop hardware is going to be a win, ultimately.
EXACTLY.
If you are a photographer, a developer, a graphics designer, a musician, a teacher, or whatever, and you are looking at buying a new Mac, what is going to get you to buy the new Apple Silicon powered Mac which is almost certain to impact your workflow in some way? If you are making purchase decisions for classrooms, what makes you buy 200 Macs with a new, unknown architecture?
The first generation of Macs on Apple silicon absolutely needs to have a significantly better price/ performance point versus the current generation or they won't sell to anything more than the most loyal fans. If the new Macs come out and pricing is not good, I could seriously see a sort-of anti-Osborne effect where people gravitate towards Intel based Macs (or away from Macs entirely) to avoid the risk of moving to new architecture.
If anything, I expect margins on the first couple generations of Macs to go DOWN as margins on the first couple generations on all Apple products are lower (also public record).
Yes, the "unknown" architecture powering the highest performing phones and tablets.
Apple has plenty of problems selling to schools for classroom use because other platforms have invested more in that use case. But ISA being the reason? No. Simply no.
IT managers are conservative, if they make a bad call, they have to support crap equipment for the next 5+ years or so. Yes, I'm aware Apple's CPUs are in the iPhone and iPad, but it's a huge change for the Mac and it's a big risk for people making those purchase decisions.
All of this is complete speculation of course but I don’t believe it will be a financial decision this one, it’ll be about creating better products.
Oh my sweet summer child.
In other words, there are definitely gains to be had. My ipad pro offers a generally more smooth and satisfying experience with silent and much cooler running CPU versus my MBP, and they offer similar battery life. Scale up to MBP battery size and I suspect we will be seeing a few hours battery life gain.
Hard to square this with the simple fact that my 2018 MacBook Pro 13" battery lifespan goes from 8 hours while internet surfing to 1.5 hours for iOS development with frequent recompilations.
-the CPU will be a lot more powerful and faster, but it isn't really faster because it's like an accelerator or something.
-if you actually use your computer get some vague "Linux desktop" or something (which is farcical and borders on parody, completely detached from actual reality). Because in the real world people actually doing stuff know that their CPU, and its work, is a significant contributor to power consumption, but if we just dismiss all of those people we can easily argue its irrelevance.
My standards for comments on HN regarding Apple events are very low, but today's posts really punch below that standard. It's armies of ignorant malcontents pissing in the wind. All meaningless, and they're spraying themselves with piss, but it always happens.
In the end this noise doesn't matter whatsoever.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/macbook-air-2020-rev...
And those accelerators don't need to be discrete, Apple can add them to their CPUs.
So, it looks like your point is: Sure, Apple is going to jump a couple process nodes from where Intel is, but everything is somehow going to remain the same?
You know Apple Silicon is going to handle this too, right?
Does Apple actually have its own silicon fab now or are they outsourcing manufacture? If the former, those are /expensive/ and they'll still be paying it off.
Apple can start leaning on their specialized ML
cores and accelerators
I think Apple sees this sort of thing as the future, and their true competitive advantage.
Most are focusing on Apple's potential edge over Intel when it comes to general compute performance/watt. Eventually Apple's likely to hit a wall there too though, like Intel.
Where Apple can really pull away is by leaning into custom compute units for specialized tasks. Apple and their full vertical integration will stand alone in the world here. Rather than hoping Intel's chips are good at the things it wants to do, it can specialize the silicone hardcore for the tasks it wants MacOS to do in the future. It will potentially be a throwback to the Amiga days: a system with performance years ahead of competitors because of tight integration with custom hardware.
The questions are:
1. Will anybody notice? The initial ARM Macs may be underwhelming. I'm not sure the initial Mac ARM silicon will necessarily have a lot of special custom Mac-oriented compute goodies. And even if it does, I don't know Mac software will be taking full advantage of it from Day 1. It will take a few product cycles (i.e., years) for this to really bear fruit.
2. Will developers bother to exploit these capabilities as Apple surfaces them? Aside from some flagship content-creation apps, native Mac apps are not exactly flourishing.
1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.
2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently.
3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here, it may mean that the non-Apple ecosystem survives and even thrives. It may even mean that Apple looks at Intel/AMD as an option for Pro MacBooks in the future. However, this does seem a little less likely.
4. This could also herald the entry of Qualcomm and the likes into laptop territory.
Looks like a very interesting and possibly industry changing move. This could potentially severely affect Intel/AMD and Microsoft. And all these players will have to play this new scenario very carefully.
What makes Android phones less attractive, in your opinion?
https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-se-vs-most-powerful-...
cpu selection is likely coming from industrialization concerns, less production line to maintain, less price per unit at volume etc, but they're going to beat that drum loud and proud for all it's worth, meanwhile the phone is cheap in area that in 2020 _do_ matter.
What matters to everyone I know is screen size, camera quality and that a really small selection of apps (messaging, maps, email, browser, bank app) work well. Raw CPU performance is only a very abstract concept.
Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.
> Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2
I don't think the Pixel 2 can be called "pre-neural". "[...] The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT.[2] It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Visual_Core
And that's not the future I am willing to buy into.
The abstractions are leaky, the VM is not a pristine environment floating on top of some vaguely well-defined architecture. The software in one has two extra layers (VM software & OS) between it and the actual platform and all this is before you start hitting weird corner cases with cpu architecture differences in the layers.
Since about 5 years Apple provides this kit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor Yeah, you got to use the hardware drivers from Apple unless it also supports PCI pass through, not sure but with the current user base I guess nobody would do that anyway.
I expect Apple to eventually run their ring-1 off the T chip, with everything else from a VM abstraction. It’s just the natural evolution of the UEFI approach, and Apple being themselves they’re doing it “their way” without waiting for the crossfire infested industry committees to play along.
What are you talking about? Android has about 72% of worldwide market share, so clearly Android phones are not significantly less attractive.
And I am not an Android fanboy, my first two phones were iPhone 1 and iPhone 3GS, and I still consider them very good phones.
[0] - Mercedes to debut Formula 1 MGU-H technology in AMG road cars - https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.mercedes-to-debut...
ICE is dead. It's a welcome piece of fun at weekends, at the track, and when we drive our classic cars. But, I'm afraid, thats it.
Well, they are. You're confusing niche market segments with overall preferences. Veblen goods don't have traction in general markets.
More precisely, Android has the BOTTOM 72% of the market, mostly cheap smartphones with thin profit margins. Almost all actual profits go to Apple.
> Apple dominates the global handset market by capturing 66% of industry profits and 32% of the overall handset revenue.
Samsung and Huawei are second and third with about 20% and 10%, respectively. The three companies combine for about 95% of the profits.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-continues-lead-gl...
In the same quarter, Apple had 12% of the global market sales, against 21% by Samsung and 18% by Huawei. They combine for 51% of the sales.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
So, that quarter, companies representing half of the worldwide cellphone sales combined for 5% of the profit.
Apple sold 12% of the phones and captured 32% of the revenue but 66% of the profit.
Apple is clearly able to sell its phones at a unique premium; I am not sure of a better way to measure "attractive".
Android will always be a low budget product as a market, because it's run by Google. Google doesn't care about its customers at all, but for the data they generate and its impact on ad sales.
Every time a user opens the Google app store, they can expect it to be worse than the time they opened it previously. Every time an Android user buys a new device, it's a crap shoot what sort of hardware issues it will have, even if it's Google or Samsung branded.
I don't know the dev ecosystem for apple broadly, but this doesn't bode well for people "bothering to exploit" the hardware.
It also took a long time for Microsoft to actually tackle the issues that UWP/Metro and WinUI/XAML faced. It took so long, it doesn’t even matter anymore and even Microsoft has moved on. But there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy, with Microsoft telling others to use WinUI while not using it everywhere themselves while refusing to update the styles of other design frameworks.
I think that hits the nail on the head. Since I only cursory listened to both the keynote and the state of the union I may have missed it, but I heard them neither mention “CPU” nor “ARM”. The term they use is “Apple Silicon”, for the whole package.
I think they are, at the core, but from what they said, these things need not even be ARM CPUs.
I was wondering how this would unfold and looks like things are moving in that direction https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/04/tensorflow-lite-core-ml-...
If TF models can interoperate with CoreML - boy that'll literally be a home run for Apple cos eventually all ML frameworks will follow suit.
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...
> Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is
> roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from
> any other manufacturer.
> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an
> extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.
> Apple has to pay Intel and AMD profit margins for
> their mac systems. They are going to be able to put
> this margin back into a combination of profit and
> tech budget as they choose.
> One interesting question I think is outstanding -
> from parsing the video carefully, it seems to me
> that devs are going to want ARM linux virtualized
> vs AMD64.
But from the developers perspective, it's incredibly convenient to use the same platform (OS + instruction set) as the machine they're targeting, even for interpreted languages. Linus Torvalds wrote a well-articulated email about this a while ago, IIRC he was commenting on POWER, but I think his points are valid. At my company, devs keep struggling with Docker on a Mac. Add to that the ARM pain, and I wonder how many will finally get a Thinkpad. Developers will switch to ARM when majority of AWS instance types goes ARM.
P.S. I love how "old-tech" HN is, but for the love of god, give us a decent way to "reply with quote".
Could you elaborate? What do you mean with the "same node"?
You mean in terms of max performance, perf per watt, or... ?
You have to copy and paste, but that's not too hard, even on mobile.
The main thing is to not use code formatting, and not break up a quoted sentence or paragraph into multiple lines.
Instead, do it the way I quoted your comment above, like this:
> *Entire quoted paragraph.*
So true! But from a market dominance perspective, it's also a bit terrifying.
Apple has an absolutely top-shelf team, designing chips.
By hand (Qualifier: Not sure if they still do, but they did, while everyone else was using automation).
They also have a great deal of experience in repaving the highway while traffic is running at capacity. They mentioned it in their keynote. They've done it three times. I have been there, for each of those times.
I was also there for the one time they completely pooched it (Can anyone say "Copeland"? Drop and give me twenty!).
It will be moderately painful. Not too bad. Quite manageable, and it will take at least a couple of years to transition.
I am in no hurry for one of those dev kits, though. They will be quite rough, and I have no compelling reason to use them.
I am looking forward to an entirely new Xcode. The current one is getting crashier every day. I'd also like to have one that can run on my iPad.
Not using automation isn’t “badass”, it’s a sign of a deeply screwed up engineering culture. It’s on par with forcing software developers to program exclusively in machine code.
Luckily, Apple uses the standard EDA tools pretty extensively so I don’t really think this applies to them. I also agree that Apple hardware engineers are generally extremely good.
They have done OK.
Sorry if I offended you. None was meant. I’ll edit that out.
Also, I don’t think what you wrote is offensive in any way - no need to edit unless you feel compelled to.
Here's Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20121014135435/http://www.chipwo...
The money shot:
"So this is the first Apple core we’ve seen done with custom digital layout. In fact, with the exception of Intel CPUs, it’s one of the first custom laid out digital cores we’ve seen in years! This must have taken a large team of layout engineers quite a long time. The obvious question is, why? This is a more expensive and time-consuming method of layout. However it usually results in a faster maximum clock rate, and sometimes results in higher density. Certainly one possibility is that Apple could not meet timing on a automatically laid out block, and chose to go with a custom laid out block. Was this a decision at the architecture stage, or did timing fail late in the design cycle and a SWAT team of layout engineers brought in to save the day? We’ll probably never know, but it is fascinating, and also 2X faster (according to the below image)"
So layout; not design. My brother is the one that does this kind of thing; not me.
There was another article that I read, back then, by a more "reputable" site, maybe an IEEE pub. Can't remember. it was a ways back.
In terms of distros maybe yes. Most distros are targeted at laptops, desktops or servers, and few of those have ARM processors.
In terms of architectural support by the kernel and low-level infra, I see no reason for that to be true at all. Open source kernels and (at least lower-level) userspace have for decades paid more attention to compatibility with various hardware architectures than proprietary operating systems.
Of course you'll have fewer drivers for hardware associated with a particular architecture if there's less interest for the hardware, or if the hardware is less available in form factors that most developers are interested in. But that applies at least equally to non-open source platforms. If MS or Apple don't have a commercial interest in maintaining support for a particular platform (and they usually have only one or two in mind), nobody's going to do it.
I wouldn't bet my farm on that without a bunch of research and cross checking because embedded linux is really common. Consider manufacturers are producing very large numbers of embedded ARM micro's with external memory interfaces. I think the majority of those are running linux.
About the virtualization, they will probably make it more efficient, resource wise? Some cloud providers are also offering ARM so...
Anxious to check the GPU performance too!
To add: Control Center on macOS and some other UI improvements hints for Mac w/ touchscreen?
Could we finally see a true BYOD, like Dex or using the improvements in Handoff?
Microsoft is working on Office updates for the new Mac silicon, and Word and Excel are already running natively on the new Mac processors, with PowerPoint even using Apple’s Metal tech for rendering. Apple has also been working with Adobe to get these pro apps up and running on these new chips.“
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”
Great, customer focused, and completely altruistic move back in the days when they killed Nvidia cards on high-performance rendering and simulation machines (and everywhere else).
So, Apple has performance libraries that are better than what Intel has to offer? So, cross-platform applications are now again “passe”?
I don’t use my iPhone for working. Why would I want iOS Apps on my computer? So I can install Apple Mail instead of Outlook
Did you miss the part where there’s going to be a “Rosetta 2” AOT/JIT translation layer?
I wonder: when I observed 20+% performance loss for high compute intensive scientific tasks Intel vs. AMD because I relied on IPP - how much performance loss will we see for the x86 to Arm?
For your average Text application you may not care about performance loss. But I bet you, that for video, image editing, science etc. you are easily 20+% worse off than before.
So what exactly is the benefit for the customer or the developer community?
So I can play Angry birds on my Mac?
Go does have the (platform) advantage (?) of preferring the "rewrite everything in Go" approach, so those just transition when the tooling supports a new architecture. Rust is intentionally going with a interop design, rather than telling people the only answer to to rewrite all their favorite libraries.
There's two areas where I believe you could call it second-class at the moment, though:
1. There is no ARM targets in Rust's "Tier 1" platform support.
2. std::arch doesn't have ARM intrinsics in stable.
For 1, ARM targets are in a weird space; they aren't Tier 1, but they're closer than most of the other Tier 2 targets. Several ARM targets are Tier 1 for Firefox, for example, so they get a bunch of work done there.
For 2, well, there hasn't been as much demand before. I expect that to change because of this.
... we'll see what the future holds :)
I expect that the Rust project will end up benefiting from the extra interest though, and improving on the things above.
Is this public knowledge yet?
I'll be pinging all the relevant folks soon-ish (we're pushing out fixes to the last remaining compiler test suite failures this week).
I mean to keep you on CC as I did the last time!
Take for example the A12Z. It has 8MB of L2 (not L3, it's L2!) cache. An Intel Core i7-1068NG7 present in the latest Macbook Pros (that performs akin to the A12Z according to Geekbench) has only 2MB of L2 cache.
No other ARM CPU has this level of L2 cache. Apple chips are not "magical", Apple just can afford packing up lots and lots of cache because they are not in the silicon "race to the bottom" like Qualcomm and Intel are, for example. L2 cache is very expensive and Apple is just hacking its way up by packing as much L2 cache as they can.
Don't take me wrong, it's not that Apple is "right" or "wrong" by doing it. They just can and did it. However, it's needless to say that their CPUs are not so different from other ARM ones, they just happen to have a budget and a business model that let's them ignore the price/performance ratio when designing chips in order to achieve the maximum performance.
It's not really that clear cut. You could also argue that the A12Z has 8MB of L3 and 0MB of L2. The L2 in the A12Z is shared while the L2 in the Intel CPU is not.
Similarly the latency of the A12Z's L2 is a lot higher than the latency of Intel's L2, but also then still lower than Intel's L3. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13661/A12X-lat.png & https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14664/ICLlat.png
So it's not "traditional" L2 as you're familiar with it, it's more like an L2.5 or something. Although still accurately called L2 as it is the second level of cache, it's just that Apple went with a rather different cache hierarchy & latency structure than Intel did. But it's really not at all accurate to compare the 8MB of L2 on the A12Z to the 2MB of L2 on Ice Lake. Those are very different caches.
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.
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.
It'll probably be more die area for equivalent performance, which for Apple might not be an issue given it's margins. Of all the ARM designs we've seen, cache is by far the unique factor in Apple's design, so comparing die size with equivalent cores+features makes complete sense.
Like others have mentioned, maybe Apple will just focus on implementing new instructions, but at that point, they will likely diverge enough from the ARM ecosystem that developers and users should be somewhat worried.
Firstly, the A12Z is 8 full cores. The "small" cores aren't limited to a subset of instructions or something, they're made on a more efficient, but lower headroom, tracing. That is a 120mm2 die, versus 197mm2 for the Ryzen 7 3700x (8 cores).
Oh but wait, the 3700x has no integrated graphics, no video encoder/decoder, no 5TFlop neural network, no secure enclave... It's absolutely huge comparatively, and has a tiny fraction of the features.
This whole die size nonsense really isn't turning out, is it?
The 3700X is of course a faster chip (not in single threads, but when all cores are engaged), but that's with active cooling and a 65W+ TDP, versus about 6W for the A12Z. Oh, and it's even a year newer than the Apple chip which is just relevant for a development kit.
Maybe we can prioritize based upon how many "Zen" codenames exist in the product. There the A12Z clearly falters!
If you want to compare cpu, graphics, video and nn, then the AMD 4800U die size is 156mm2, this chip has +4MB L2+L3 cache (12MB total), a much better GPU+FP16 for 4TFlop nn, and full AVX2+SMT cores more than the A12Z. The little A12 cores might be full ISA, but they're 1/3 the die area and are lower performance. NEON is half the size of AVX2 and the GPU difference alone would likely push the A12Z past 156mm2. And there are 15W/45W versions of this chip going as low as 10W. The A12Z is likely around 10W+ too in the iPad Pro and the devkit, but I can't find sources on this.
Looking a lot more competitive now isn't it?
The Qualcomm 855 is 73mm2, and the A12 is 83mm2, and the performance gains here are impressive. Beyond this, A12Z 120mm2 vs AMD APU 156mm2 and it's starting to look like a much closer fight, and by no means a perf/watt or perf/$ advantage for Apple until we see real systems.
Die size is _the_ trade off Apple is making with their ARM/RISC+loads of L2 cache design. It's a trade off every chip makes, but it's especially important here with large cache sizes. I don't doubt in a couple of generations Apple can compete with an AMD 4800U CPU+GPU on real world multi-threaded tasks at 10W (assuming 15% increases/gen), but the 4800U is already a few months old now. Apple fanboys never learn. Sigh. Also, Apple fanboys are the new Intel fanboys when stressing single thread performance.
Sources: http://www.hw-museum.cz/cpu/414/amd-ryzen-7-3700x https://www.techpowerup.com/264801/amd-renoir-die-shot-pictu... https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/igpu-amd_radeon_8_graphics_ren... https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/855 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12
Just to be clear, you (and several others running the same playbook) are attacking Apple's entrant from every possible dimension, cherry picking specific micro-traits from various other systems (even if they aren't SoCs and have a tiny fraction of the functionality -- hey, if you can tease a dumb argument out of it...) and turning that into some sort of Voltron combined creation to claim..."victory"? And people impressed with Apple's progress based upon actual reality are the "fanboys"?
Again about cache. To repeat what has already been said, the A12Z doesn't have an L3 cache. The L2 cache is an L3 cache given that it isn't per core.
The A12Z has 8MB of this L2+L3 cache. The 855 has 7.8MB of L2+L3 cache. The 4800U has 12MB of L2+L3 cache. The 3700X has 36MB of L2+L3 cache. So tell me again how the A12Z is somehow hacking the system or cheating? This is an outrageously dumb argument that the, I guess, "AMD fanboys" have all fed each other to run around trying to shit on Apple, and it betrays a complete lack of knowledge -- just copy/pasting some bullshit.
Enough about the stupid cache nonsense because it has no basis in reality.
"Also, Apple fanboys are the new Intel fanboys when stressing single thread performance."
It is the single most important facet of a single-user performance system, or we'd all be using shitty MediaTek NNN-core designs.
And, I mean, the A12Z annihilates the 4800U at single thread performance, and equals it at multithread performance...for a little tablet chip, and despite that 4800U having that mega, super, giant hack of die size cache, and despite it boosting that single core to 4Ghz, versus "just" 2.49Ghz for the A12Z.
Oh, and that Apple core has a 5TFlop neural engine aside from the GPU. Separate hardware encoders/decoders (not as a facet of the GPU). Camera controllers. And on and fucking on.
What Apple has done is very impressive, and I imagine on their desktop/laptop chips they'll be a lot less conservative, likely with all "Big" cores. Maybe they'll even put dedicated L2 cache!
sidenote - you talked about the AMD chip being a "couple of months" old. The A12Z we are talking about is over two years old. You understand that we don't know what Apple is going to drop in their actual production designs, and we are talking about the A12Z because they happened to be confident enough to demo their systems on it.
Here's a I can haz cache meme for you: https://i.imgflip.com/468v8g.jpg
You want to compare Desktop systems with a mobile chip, but get blown out completely by the multi-thread performance, and then when comparing to a laptop chip when people point out the cache amounts say but look at the single thread performance. Who is the fanboy here? Apple can spend the money on die size/cache if it wants for single thread performance, but the rest of us care about a complete multi core CPU+GPU system. More cache means somewhat lower clocks and power use too, big surprise.
AMD 4800U FP16 4TFlop is 8TFlop for FP8 which is what Apple has, so enough of that. The 8 AVX2 units in the 8 core 4800U will do another ~1TFlop of FP32 if needed in 15W. The A13's AMX seems to have about 1TFlop more of FP8, which is like dual core AVX2 and not 8 cores of AVX2.
Audio/Camera and Video decoders/encoders all do the same stuff anywhere and are basically a commodity for any number of standards, so enough of that too.
Just to be clear, you and other Apple fanboys just can't handle what Apple has currently in CPU is no real way better than a 4800U. Single thread performance (with loads of cache!) is important to JS in the web browser, but by now even most AAA games will do better with more cores, and most real world tasks also do better with more cores. I'm just comparing reality, and you and other fanboys are the ones that aren't.
The 4800U is being generous for multicore CPU+GPU, the A12Z is about equal to the 12 Watt 4 core/4 thread Ryzen 2300U in multi threaded+GPU tasks, it's a 2 year old cheaper processor, and Apple is selling the same performance currently in a $1000+ iPad, I guess this is only possible because of fanboys. Even this is impressive to me given it's an ARM processor+in house GPU and Apple has been making chips for all of a decade now, but I lost all respect for people touting single threaded performance (with loads of cache!) 15 years ago when consumer dual cores first came out. The 2300U will run Shadow of the Tomb Raider at ~30FPS for reference.
Sources: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro... https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re... https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/855
"The A12X/Z has ~18MB of L1+L2+System cache."
The A12X/Z has 256KB of L1 cache per core, 6MB of L2/3 cache shared by all cores.
(256*8)+6144 = 8.2MB of L1+L2 cache.
It has no L3 cache. I don't know where you invented this so-called "system" cache, but are we now ridiculously adding GPU core caches or something absurd? Knowing this argument, probably.
The 855 has 512KB of L1 cache, 1,768KB of L2 cache, 5,120KB of L3 cache.
512+1768+5120 = 7.4MB of cache
You seem to be pulling numbers out of your ass, so refuting the rest of the bullshit you're inventing is a rather futile exercise. But keep on talking about "fanboys". LOL. You came straight form some sad AMD-rationalization website.
Please edit flamebait out of your posts here. It's against the rules for good reason, and it evokes worse from others.
Somewhat ironically, I think it's mostly the languages trying to be safer alternatives to C that are most behind on supporting ARM.
I've done a little bit of Lisp development on my Raspberry Pi (with SBCL and Emacs/Slime), and in most cases I don't have to change anything moving between my AMD64/Linux desktop, Intel/OSX MBP, and ARM64/Linux Raspberry Pi. And that's even when using CFFI bindings to C libraries.
I'm not sure SBCL's ARM backend is at the same level as the x86 backends, but it works well, and there's on going work on it.
And yet the new Macbook pro base models feature an 8th Gen Core i5. That is 2 generations behind the bleeding edge. I think some people might be experiencing the speed problems you described because their machine has an old gen processor in a shiny new box
I just want to plug in an eGPU to an RTX 2080 card. Instead, you have this incredibly limited set of officially supported cards the are also hyper expensive. Black Magic stopped making their eGPU Pro, so even if money is no object you can't get a great laptop GPU extension that supports their XDR displays.
Now, you might be saying, if you want a great GPU why are buying a laptop? Well, 1) even if I were to get the one model of Mac that allows me to do something interesting with GPUs (Mac Pro), I still can't install the NVIDIA cards I want. And 2) laptop + great eGPU is a great setup that is supported in the non-Mac space, so it is not a bizarre request.
All of this to say: the ARM stuff is fine, but it won't really move the needle for me, and doesn't address any of my performance issues, and I would argue a lot of the performance issues a lot of people actually have (especially graphics artists).
Hahaha, look for a user-agent at 1:44:26 :) They use old Intel Mac for a virtualization demo.
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 better battery life for that screen.
3) More opportunity for tightly integrated acceleration chips On die for codec, ML, and other hardware acceleration methods for Apple only software libraries.
4) Easy porting between iOS and macOS, and tvOS.
#3 will be the most significant.
It's in fairly good shape, and has an active community. With the current proliferation of IoT devices, both the kernel and userland are well-maintained, and plenty of distros are available. The kernel also benefits from much of the work done for Android and Chromebooks as well.
All of the usual FOSS software is ported and runs well. As of this moment, you could easily take your pick from any of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, Slack, or Alpine just for starters, plus a whole mess of specialty distros. Many of those offer both 32- and 64-bit ARM versions.
Also bear in mind that recent ARM CPUs do support hardware-assisted virtualization as well. KVM and Xen are both available for ARM today, and I'd be shocked if Apple's Hypervisor.framework doesn't roll out with ARM support in the new macOS version as well.
(I'm writing this from Firefox in Manjaro ARM on a PineBook Pro, that I use as my daily driver)
Well we've already seen things gets delayed and even canceled (AirPower).
Cook's Apple is more about supply chain (where he excels), so if indeed the silicon design works, they would be able to 'ship'.
Go's crypto libraries are heavily optimized on x86, not so on arm (see Phoronix Graviton2 benches).
We will have to wait and see how much of Apple's halo effect will contribute positively to optimized arm code.
They are going about expanding its marketshare.
There are close to 1 Billion iPhone users, most of them have never used a Mac. We will need a 2nd Devices for some of those task. And that will either be a iPad or Mac. Out of the 1.5B total PC Market, Apple has 100M Mac users. I will say it is not too far fetched to say Apple wants to double the number of Mac users to 200M.
For every $100 dollar going to Intel, Apple could knock $200 off its Retail price while getting the same margin.
A $799 MacBook ( the same starting price of iPad Pro ) will be disruptive, the premium is now small enough over the ~$500 PC Notebook price.
In the longer term I think Apple is trying to reach 2 Billion Active Devices. And it certainly cant do this with iPhone alone. There are plenty of Market Space for the Mac to disrupt.
They're not going to change their retail price. It'll be the same, but "better"/"different" ... that's how they'll market it.
That would be a GIGANTIC unique differentiator for the Macs. Once you see it, you won't be able to tolerate a non-OLED display. ever again.
I'm just thinking about my development environment background, Terminal, etc in pure black and off... Wow.
One word, Catalina.
Umm what? Rust supports ARM as a first class citizen as does LLVM. They only list ARM as second class because it's not a desktop platform generally. https://forge.rust-lang.org/release/platform-support.html
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.
Question is,
1. They are going to design their own CPU for the whole range of Mac? up to 10W for MacBook, up to 45W for MacBook Pro. ~150W for iMac, ~ 250W for Mac Pro ? How is that financially feasible considering the volume of Mac Pro sold. Or do they intend to use those high TDP chip in their server farm / iCloud?
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.
3. Would it be like the PowerPC era where you will get a new iMac once you finish with the development kit?
Finally while I am excited for ARM Mac, at the same time I am also feeling a little sad. Good bye x86.
2. They're saying integrated. Whether they also throw Radeons on high-end desktops is probably not yet determined. (They have a two year roadmap for this rollout, and I think it's pretty obvious they'll start with the portables/iMacs where the benefits of ARM are more likely to outweigh the pain of change for more people.)
Will they have a wide TDP range of designs? Yes. On feasibility, there are two major components to the cost - first is the engineering cost for design. You can bet that these costs are not massive; Apple has roughly $200 billion cash on hand right now. Most of the work will be scaled up as part of their overall design process.
The second cost component is the Non-recurring engineering to get a mask-set made for the chips. A 7nm start right now costs maybe in the range of $20mm? If the Mac Pro is required to stand on its own feet financially, perhaps that will push out timing / push up cost. On the other hand, if one considers the cost of the top end chip to be a marketing cost, it’s literally a rounding error.
GPU - Apple is going to have their own GPUs, and no longer worry about AMD and Nvidia. They’ll have complete control of the hardware and software stack and control their own destiny. I would be very surprised to see dual GPU options.
If Apple took funds from a foreign subsidiary to pay shareholder dividends it would have to pay
1) Federal Corporate income tax of 20%. 2) CA state corporate income tax of 9%.
Then out of the 73% left over, the shareholder would pay state income tax + federal dividend tax. That means the shareholder ends up keeping between 50-60% of the funds Apple paid.
If Apple borrows the funds instead, it owes no federal or state corporate tax. The shareholder just needs to pay state income tax and federal dividend taxes, so after tax they end up with 70-85% of the funds Apple paid.
Keep in mind that this doesn't imply a different chip design. TDP is primarily a function of intended application and cooling capacity, not chip tech.
That said, they've already demonstrated ability to do this with A12/A12X/A12Z, which are the same chip at different CPU/GPU core counts. Clock rates are not impacted except where thermal limitations (TDP) impose a limit.
I think GPU scaling will be much harder than CPU, so whereas Apple can surpass Intel CPUs for all but the highest segments, putting together a standalone GPU will be hard and very interesting to see. For an entry-level GPU? No issues. But what about a midrange (AMD RX 5700XT or Nvidia 2070S)? And not to mention the top-tier Nvidia 2080ti.
The other unspoken risk is that while Apple may be vertically integrating its SOC, it still relies on a fab like TSMC. Intel's recent problem is rooted in their inability to move off legacy 14nm fabrication process. TSMC may have done great in 7nm and now to 5nm transition, but what happens if/when they stumble? Would Apple also want to acquire them or build its own fabs to mitigate this risk?
"Apple claims the GPU in the iPad Pro is equivalent to an Xbox One S, although how they came to thise conclusion is difficult to say since we know so little about the underpinnings of the GPU." [1]
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad-pro...
Apple sales for Mac are much smaller numbers compared to consoles, they change generations more quickly and amount of optimization in GPU-intensive apps is nowhere close to consoles.
So they might be able to compete with Intel iGPU, but that's nowhere close to AMD or Nvidia offerings.
And PC graphics APIs abstract way less of the system than they once did
Apple might have huge leverage on mobile with iPhone because Android graphics drivers are horrible mess, but on Windows GPU drivers are decent and building custom driver stack sounds like too much.
Apple's custom GPUs they use in their SoCs are arguably more effort on their part.
I'd be curious if Apple's non-mobile SOC roadmap emphasizes on CPU development while still allowing for eGPU setups or even some built-in integration (e.g. Mac Pro with Apple CPU and AMD GPU) initially. Maybe in 5-10 years they'll shift to focusing on the GPU front and bring out their own dedicated GPU.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=GCN+1.0&...
That being said, frankly I'm amazed at what most modern mobile GPUs are capable of and for most people who are casual gamers, that level of performance will be more than enough. What Apple will bring to the table will certainly be better than that, it's already better than Intel GPUs and they can still support 3rd party GPUs if necessary.
The demo they showed of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 1080p looked great for a game, AND it also looked awful if you compared it to the PC version on Ultra settings.
The whole presentation struck me as a big middle finger to Intel and just Intel.
I was actually a bit surprised they would break that kind of a demo out at WWDC -- I've seen that game not running in emulation and it was beautiful. That demo wasn't.
Looking at it without context however, it demonstrated the capability of the platform to run a AAA game without developer optimization/consideration.
And it demonstrates someone could make a stylized game similar to Fortnite.
And that was released in 2018. By the time Apple put out desktop class silcon in end of 2020, surely it will be significantly scaled up?
But landing troops (they can't march, it's an island, and the difference between amphibious and land based operations matters a lot) would be extremely difficult, and not obviously in the PLA's favor. See, for example:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
Besides that significant causalities and economic damage to both sides, which of course they'd eventually win, but it'd be a geopolitical disaster that won't end with the quelling of the armed forces.
China has far more to gain not going this route.
Although it would assuredly take some time to ramp up, TSMC should be able to spawn fabs outside of Taiwan, out of CCP reach. They are already building one in the US, albeit with a small output.
We only have mobile SOCs as a reference point so far, but Apple is doing very well on that metric.
>On the GPU side of things, Apple has also been hitting it out of the park; the last two GPU generations have brought tremendous efficiency upgrades which also allow for larger performance gains. I really had not expected Apple to make as large strides with the A13’s GPU this year, and the efficiency improvements really surprised me. The differences to Qualcomm’s Adreno architecture are now so big that even the newest Snapdragon 865 peak performance isn’t able to match Apple’s sustained performance figures. It’s no longer that Apple just leads in CPU, they are now also massively leading in GPU.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15246/anandtech-year-in-revie...
Surely this is an advantage to being fabless? If TSMC stumble, they can evaluate other options. Same for AMD, where would they be now if they were still tied to GlobalFoundries?
That said, what are the other options if not TSMC? Besides Intel, Samsung is only other cutting-edge option. Intel's 7nm would be technically on par with TSMC's 5nm (marketing names aside). https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process
There is a chance, however unlikely, that TSMC's 3nm push will run into issues and be delayed. Would create an interesting scenario where Apple would pay Intel to fab their SOCs.
Why would Intel agree to that? Have they ever fabbed any other companies design?
There were rumours going around about its demise a few years ago, but a fair bit of that was simply their failure to ship 10nm parts on schedule AFAIK. They're still doing some degree of third-party manufacturing, and I don't doubt once they reach a point of having the capacity for their first-party products on 10nm we might seem them expand.
However, the inevitable flip-side of this is unlike TSMC/SS where Apple can bid the highest for the early production of a new node, Intel are highly likely to keep the new node for themselves to start with.
Building your own fab would be a gargantuan task.
A future JV with Intel seems more likely (despite it being very unlikely in absolute terms).
Some examples here https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/917482-arm-and-pcie-lan...
Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble.
But I've been too pessimistic before.
Rosetta 2 cross-compiles Intel binaries to ARM. Why would VST/AU plug-in binaries be an exception?
Last time Rosetta was on a process by process basis, so you might have to make some unfortunate choices.
Edit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...
> The system prevents you from mixing arm64 code and x86_64 code in the same process. Rosetta translation applies to an entire process, including all code modules that the process loads dynamically.
Also transpile is a source to source compilation and isn't the right term here.
A lot of people do say that, including a lot of professionals, but in my opinion Logic with its stock plugins is already absolutely great. Some people buy a lot of plugins because they don't know how to use the builtin plugins, and some because they enjoy playing with new stuff more than making music (and yes, some who know what they're doing too).
Maybe in your segment but I can't think of using Windows as a web developer even without any of the "Pro" app from Apple.
I don't think they can afford not to - mac users make up a signifcant share of their target audience.
Furthermore there's always the emulation option although it remains to be seen how performant that would be in an such a demanding, time-critical application like AU/VST instrument and effects.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/apple/apple-spend-10b-us...
https://twitter.com/domipheus/status/1167566293861588992
It's definitely possible, just need to expost the PCIe lanes in a sensible way (this has been rare to see on ARM-based machines so far) and have PCIe device manufacturers distribute drivers for ARM macOS.
Did it do any CPU-intensive stuff (skinning, deformation), or was it just GPU-intensive viewing?
High-end VFX will be interesting for this with Apple (Maya, Houdini, Nuke) - already there was quite a lot of anger at OpenGL being deprecated and Vulcan not being officially supported. Another instruction set into the mix for highly-optimised apps (lots of SIMD code) is going to be quite annoying, especially for the CPU renderers (Arnold, Renderman, etc)...
That seems a bit weird considering OpenGL has been deprecated in macOS already. I would have expected a full removal once the first ARM Macs ship.
That conclusion seems a bit too far fetched from my point of view. There are many users that use Logic on a MBP and with Photoshop it's even more common to use it on a Laptop.
Sooner or later a ARM MacPro is comming but if i'd had to guess i'd say that will take a while. There were 6 years between trashcan and the current cheese grater. So maybe 2025 then ;)
This isn't just going to replace low-end machines; its every machine they sell, within two years. Probably starting with low-end, but moving up.
[0] https://www.amd.com/system/files/49010-gddr5-hbm-1260x709.pn...
I think it's a more common problem to see things like the T2 security chip not being present on older hardware or hackintosh(unsupported) hardware, so if you're not running the right hardware you can't take advantage of a feature (AR in certain iPhones) or you won't have the performance advantage (Filevault encryption with T2 chips vs encrypted by CPU).
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 that?
I don't see Apple coming out with an ARM Mac Pro within 3 years anyway. Why would they do that? No upside for them, that market has to be won back first. Slowly start with laptops and iMac, focusing on consumers, get the OS in shape and third-party vendors accustomed to the platform first.
iPad-like performance is already fast enough for almost all consumers, and I'm sure Apple doesn't want to break with Intel on everything right away.
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 signal that the future of the Mac Pro is at best uncertain. So maybe hold off on that Mac support for the next two years.
Apple is not going to make an ARM Xeon. The resulting computer would be so expensive after you amortise all the R&D to create a single workstation class CPU for it, that nobody would be able to afford it. All the Pros who bought Mac Pro got played hard.
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.
Now, it turns out that Apple wants to complete a transition in 2 years... they are not keeping x86 around for the Mac Pro longer than that. It's not credible that Apple can just scale up their CPU into a workstation part. So if you are making pro software then you have to come to the inescapable conclusion that Apple is, in fact, not serious about the Pro market, and it's probably best to avoid expending further development resources on the Mac.
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.
1) Before the demo even starts: all Apple apps, pro or casual? Already running. Microsoft Office? Already running. Adobe Creative Cloud? Already running. That's the vast majority of the Mac userbase right there.
2) No apparent hard cuts on the legacy. I was expecting them to not support x86 backwards compatibility if they could get away with it, but apparently they're committed. Even naming the technologies "Universal Binaries 2" "Rosetta 2" is a confident been-there-done-that-will-do-it-again presentation. Unlike last time around, there also doesn't seem to be a major removal of macOS APIs?
3) Acknowledging what kind of x86 stuff machines are used for by showing VMs right away, and (trying to?) show Docker right away. Is that the first Linux demo in an Apple keynote presentation? It was a Linux desktop environment, even.
Now it seems this ARM announcement was a bit rushed by design, flashing by the features without allowing a substantial look. So it's likely we're going to be dissappointed by x86 performance and having to say good bye to APIs (this for sure is the end of OpenGL right? edit: no [1]), but they do leave an impression of having their priorities of broad software support straight and a pretty seamless transition as far as you can get one.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/porting_your...
I do believe they showed a Linux ARM VM. And not a x86 VM.
x86 VM's are probably going to take a massive QEMU performance tax. The positive news it the boost for the Linux ARM space, which will see a massive boost.
Games on Mac? Games on Mac with Windows Bootcamp? Yeah... Maybe buy a console or a second PC...
That's going to be interesting in the end. Being able to build/smoke test x86 containers on macOS will be important, at least for a while. So it's up in the air whether that will be addressed, although it's worth noting that Docker already supports cross building images [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD3J89ZE&t=5918
[2]: https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/
Another interesting note is that the user agent in their Apache logs still says "Intel Mac OS X". Wonder if they'll keep that.
They're shipping a 'Development Transition Kit' Mac mini with an A12Z this week, so it's not like the numbers are going to stay private for a long time. Even if there's an NDA, someone's bound to break it.
One big question though will be how this devkit benchmarks against the current maxed Intel mac mini. I'm curious if GPU performance beats the current BlackMagic eGPU. (rx 580)
I'm not intrisically excited for a new Apple product, but if they could have told me, we can deliver 50% extra battery life in your new MacBook at comparable performance, that would build up some hype and maybe mindshare.
> not helpful to [...] their ability to keep selling Intel stuff.
I hope that that's it. If we're going through the pains of a platform transition, I'd like to get something out of it.
Let's say that the new numbers are mindblowingly good. So then what? Nobody buys anything from them until next year because they're all waiting? Yikes. This way fewer people will be mortified of the idea of buying something right now instead of waiting.
It's a kit to allow developers to prepare for transitioning their applications to ARM, for future retail MacOS/ARM devices. It's not a new Mac Mini, and it doesn't make sense to compare the retail machines to this dev kit (which is probably running a yet-to-be-fully-optimised OS)
These fail because Apple is orders of magnitude away from Nvidia and AMD in performance, plus this is a chip with a very limited TDP. I think they will fall a bit slower than current AMD APUs.
“PC guys are not going to just figure this out.
They're not going to just walk in.”Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they also didn't announce any actual hardware when they introduced Intel Macs.
Interestingly, for the PowerPC->Intel transition, they also had an Developer Transition Kit: https://www.macstories.net/stories/this-is-not-a-product-the...
I think concerns about how Apple will handle the transition can generally be addressed by the relatively smooth transition from PPC to Intel. Apple has literally done this before.
6502 -> 68k in 1984 via hard-cutover [edit: see cestith's reply, there's more to this story than I knew]
68k -> PPC in 1994 via emulation
PPC -> x86 in 2006 via Rosetta JIT translation
x86 -> ARM in 2020 via Rosetta 2 static recompilation
You could even argue the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was a transition of similar magnitude (although solely on PowerPC processors), with Classic Environment running a full Mac OS 9 instance [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...
Rosetta 2, Universal 2, The DTK Program demo on ARM,, it's the same plan.
Apple did great last go-around, and they are leagues ahead of Microsoft or any other tech company in such a massive/successful platform shift.
This is their 3rd architecture shift btw - 680x0 -> Power -> Intel -> ARM. They practically wrote the book on how to do it right.
They really don't need to do that much.
Even if apple could make a great server/high performance chip that seems like possibly a lot of additional work for little gain in the market?
Keeping intel chips for some computers may make more sense in keeping their toes in the water for intel incase they need to rekindle that relationship for future projects down the road.
Also means == some products (13" mbp) migrate fully and are Apple only, And some don't (Mac Pro) and have both options.
Just reading the tea leaves.
But the killing of openGL and 32-bit software is making me wonder about their previously-amazing commitment to supporting older things.
They did some of this before intel, I think with some of the transitional MacOS->OS X APIs.
Last PowerPC Macs were released in October 2005 and first Intel-only MacOS X was released in August 2009, almost 4 years later.
Intel support was announced during OS X Tiger, and 10.4.4 was the first public release with support for x86. 10.7.0 was the first release without support for PPC. So 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard were the two major releases with support for both Intel and PPC.
Now, Apple tends to provide security updates for at least a few years for each OS release, so I can envision recent Intel Macs getting security updates for another 4-5 years.
I would be astonished if an Ax chip can match the media creation performance of the Xeons in the MacPro and iMacPro any time soon. The top Xeon has 28 cores, and matching that is going to be an interesting challenge.
I think it's more likely there were be further splits in the range, with prosumer iMacs running Ax and no-compromise pro models staying on Xeon for at least the next few years.
The performance and/or battery gains is almost incidental.
How? Did Intel suddenly allow their CPUs to be manufactured by TSMC? Or, vice versa, agree to manufacture Apple's Ax chips?
For customers, both average users and developers it will be a pain with little to be gained.
You don’t think companies like Oculus are envious of Apple’s flexibility from not having to rely on Qualcomm for their mobile SoCs? It’s not just about profit margin.
If Apple could do that and play it to their advantage, they would have done so a long time ago.
Higher margins and profits are the drivers in the end. Strategic control or not is just a way they use to achieve that. It is a publicly traded company, after all.
> You don’t think companies like Oculus are envious of Apple’s flexibility from not having to rely on Qualcomm for their mobile SoCs?
I doubt Oculus cares given their goal. There are pros and cons of vertically integrating an entire company into one.
However, performance/watt matters too.
Apple has zero presence in data centers.
I read people here writing "double the battery life" without any source, but even if that was the case I own a laptop that does 2 hours on battery, I use it to run models on a discrete GPU so power efficiency goes out of the window anyway, it's really not achievable.
The other one can handle average workloads for 12 hours and weights a bit more then a kilo, if it was smaller or lighter it would be a much worse laptop than it is (if it's too light it has no stability and you fight constantly to keep it steady on your desk)
Who needs more?
I think it does. Other than double the battery life (which I wouldn't really need, but my Dad who travels a lot would absolutely love), the big thing is thermals (which were specifically mentioned in the keynote).
The biggest constraint on Laptop performance is thermal throttling. That's why gaming laptops have huge bulky fans, and a current MacBook has pretty decent performance for short bursts, but if you are running something (say a compiler) at full throttle for a few minutes then it gets significantly throttled.
Better thermal performance (which is directly proportional to power usage) could well be the key to unlocking close-to-desktop performance in a laptop form-factor. Which could be a pretty big win for the MacBook Pro market.
Aren't they mostly web/app developers?
With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
Linux, like any OS written in the past 30 years, is substantially architecture-independent. My day job involves coding for several devices with Linux kernels on ARM (32bit) and Aarch64 and I have no idea which is which, nor any need to.
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Linux able to support new arch but it not means ecosystem going to support any arch. ARM is great arch for now.
(‘ARM’ has become meaningless marketing drivel; there are physically existing pairs of 32-bit ‘ARM’ processors that have exactly zero physically existing machine instructions in common.)
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
It makes sense that they wouldn't:
1. Its dev hardware, not final production hardware. They'll want to compare the A13 or A14 (or whatever SoC they finally use) for benchmarks.
2. Until the apps are optimized, it doesn't make sense for Apple to put itself in the position of bad press with premature figures.
The A12Z is itself only a small update on the A12X from 2018, so it's basically two years behind whatever will ship in actual ARM Macs this fall...
You have to consider that Apple engineers are busy designing new SoCs for the entire Mac line-up: optimizing the A12Z for the DTK is probably not their top priority at the moment. They will want to wow people with a new MacBook (Air? Pro? <blank>?) this fall: that SoC should be their priority...
I guess they did some homework before ditching Intel. The big question Is if they have enough headroom for manufacturing reliable chips with sustained high power.
This is Apple we're talking about. They boast about unverifiable performance claims in pretty much every product they announce...
And, one of the comparison points can only ever be run on a highly locked down black box of an OS.
While it's certainly possible the A12Z in the Developer Transition Kit is a true drop-in from the iPad, I would be surprised if it's not clocked significantly higher and actively cooled given the relaxed power and thermal restrictions.
It's the CPU in the iPad Pro, performance numbers are out there in the wild. The only big change is the RAM. This isn't a retail product, it's a developer kit. When they release retail Macs I'm sure there will be some performance numbers.
They are also being very very coy with what they have under their sleeves because of small of an upgrade A13 was over A12.
Same thing happened during the intel transition. The first consumer chips were dual cores, but the DTK was Pentium 4s
Steve Jobs demoed OSX first. Then surprised everybody by saying, OSX had lived a double life in a secret building for many years (with photo), and that he had been running on an Intel Pentium 4 during the demo all morning. Nothing about performance.
There was also a developer system back then; an Intel Pentium 4 in a PowerMac case.
In a lot of ways, this is far more ambitious, and could mean a lot more for Apple long term, but...
... The one thing that hit me the most was, how impressed I was with Apple back then, and how excited I was that a company could do this. Steve Jobs presented it really well, but this time it felt quite flat.
... I really, wish they worked a bit on their showman-ship. They rushed through so many small things, and the presentation felt unnatural. Like they have all over-rehearsed it, but are still reading while presenting (you could even see eye-movements). It is just too smooth, too generic, and a bit too polished.
Please slow down, focus on only the most interesting bits, and give us time to digest it...
The Apple I and II were MOS 6502 machines except for the Apple IIgs which was a 65c816. Then the early Macs were 680x0 machines. Then PowerPC. Then Intel.
They looked at Intel chips for the iPhone and settled on Arm before launch. I wouldn't be surprised if some very brittle, early development version of iOS was running on an Intel mobile platform at some point.
Everyone else is acting, but they aren't actors.
What's important, for those paying attention, is that Apple promoted PowerPC emulation with the first x86 Macs in OS X 10.4 and then removed it after 10.6. If you think Apple won't screw you again, well, go ahead, it's your money.
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases
So if you're worried about not being able to run your Intel Mac OS X software in 2030, yeah, you should probably avoid these new ARM Macs.
(2) It's not 2030. If you're reading this is 2030, HN won't let you reply. That's a separate but related problem.
(3) Time passed, so fuck you is not a customer-centered philosophy. Time passed, so I'm going to remove already shipped capabilities is a customer centered philosophy in the sense that it's centered on fucking the customer.
(4) I have an Apple IIe and a MacPro3,1 and a whole bunch in between: fool me once, shame on you; fool me fifteen times, shame on me.
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
It’s extremely weird to me to assume that an opinion someone posts in an online message board will be heavily influenced by their stock portfolio.
(I'm curently taking bids on an HN account with 4575 interweb points.)
It was a confident CEO that used his own words to passionately live-demo the products his company was developing and selling. He almost apologetically told us that Apple had to make the change to deliver the notebooks he had promised two years before -- But couldn't with PowerPC. It made sense. And then, he showed us that all along Apple had the foresight to plan for this many years ahead.
It was inspiring, and I was really excited about it. As a user and computer scientist, it made me curious about OSX. As a developer I wanted to support their platform, and went on to work on iOS apps a couple of years later. Apple felt like the future.
This time, I feel unenthusiastic, and wondering where to go next... Despite the fact, that I objectively think this has the potential to be far more significant.
Delivery with confidence and passion for the product always matter. A lot.
I am sorry, but I really need confidence in the person leading the platform I am developing for. My income depends on it, so I need to feel confident that the platform will actually move forward in the right direction.
I don't have confidence that a dildo on a stick can make the right decisions... But what do I know... I suppose, I have heard stranger things.
And what is the difference with the current switch?
I mean, apart from the presentation, which I do not care about.
The fact that all the demoes were on their top-of-line most-expensive machines fell very weird to me. "Look at this amazing performance" would be great if the demo was on a Macbook Air.
Apple has development kits running in modified Apple TV's. This is a chip that has essentially been out for a few years in iPad Pros. Why would Apple announce numbers based on this? It also assumes Apple will ship future laptops without fans or ports, which is how the development kit is coming out.
Apple will most likely have an A14X out later this year in at least one laptop. That's going to be significantly newer and more advanced than the A12Z in development kits.
I looked all over developer.apple.com and didn't find anything.
That's not this presentation - when they actually ship hardware (transition kit not included) - then they'll talk performance.
That, however, was not an option. So they have to tread carefully in what they say and they also have to be a bit careful about showing off too much.
They only had to tout the benefits of ARM insofar as to placate the fears of consumers (their Rosetta story plus virtualization story helped there) and to provide some reasonable justification to actually make devs at least a bit excited, even though they have to do additional work.
Plus: No ARM Mac (except the transition kit) currently exists. It’s not even clear if the first Mac they will announce is even finished yet, if only internally. And even if it is finished: Do you think going on stage now and talking about a new MacBook Air that has twice the performance and 50% more battery life as the current MacBook Air – oh, and you can get one in December – would be a good idea?
This is Apple’s tightrope walk to avoid too much of an Osborne effect. I think they are ok with some Osborne effect (if only because they know that even if no one buys an Intel Mac ever again during the next two years transition time they will not go bankrupt, so far from it) but you don’t have to provoke one, right?
I expect plenty of numbers and comparisons when they introduce the actual first ARM Mac.
Mobile completely passed it by.
I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc.
And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much. I wonder if they’ll want to make another stab at it seeing Apple’s direction with strong vertical integration.
While I don’t think x86 as a platform is going away anytime soon, I feel like its market share and by extension its relevance will slowly dwindle over the next decade or two. Interesting times.
They completely missed the boat on mobile and AMD has leapfrogged them very recently on desktop. On top of that there were the Spectre vulnerabilities which shook confidence even further. This announcement is another huge blow given the extent to which the entire consumer electronics industry tends to follow Apple. I would be interested to hear an insider's perspective on such a rapid decline.
You can have the best architecture in the world (no idea if they have) and the best engineers, it's hard to compete when you're so far behind in transistor size.
Instead of putting them way ahead it cost them years of recovery and let AMD sneak up from behind.
That had to be a heavy blow because the politics in this company are ugly.
I feel like sometimes people look past the most obvious signs of why a company is struggling.
For example, Apple’s move to the mothership had a major impact on the company. It was one of the company’s biggest “product” releases. No one mentions this as a reason for anything.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-ceo-idUSKBN1JH1VW
The problem (in my non-insider view) is that Intel's 10nm just hasn't delivered. It was delayed substantially, and faced several problems even after rollout.
We've been used to x86 dominance on the desktop and servers for so long that I think a future where there are two architectures with critical mass and one of the architectures can be licensed by a number of firms is hard to imagine.
There will be some short term effort and pain but it must surely be a better competitive environment than we have now.
The historic / current Intel and AMD duopoly has surely not been healthy.
The thing we can talk about is Apple's strategic direction. The good version has Apple releasing a notably superior general purpose computer, maybe even gaining more marketshare in the process. The bad version has the Mac turning into an iOS development station. The fact they showed a game of all things does give some encouragement.
Key questions:
1. How open the new OS/Models will be, and how much developer support we get. The more open, the more likely is will be a powerful general purpose computer.
2. Whether Apple can keep riding the tiger regarding processors. I'm sure they did their due diligence, and the new processors will be powerful enough. But x86 isn't dead yet, AMD is capable and even Intel isn't dead - they still have a hand to play.
If Apple can keep at this, developers will flock in and we'll see nice stuff. If x86 (re)gains its momentum, Apple will be left behind, but they will be unlikely to switch back (unifying processors with the iPhone has a lot of advantages for Apple), and we end up with the bad future.
Apple took a chance today, we'll see whether it pays.
I'm curious if Apple's move is going to finally help ARM succeed on the server side.
Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.
iOS apps can be built, for Intel, using Catalyst, with very trivial changes in code, but we still see Electron hanging around today like a bad smell.
I can't imagine this will change anything.
Anyways Catalyst won't even be relevant in the long term, once iPhone apps are written in SwiftUI
> When bringing iPad apps to macOS, you can now use the Optimize Interface for Mac target setting to use native macOS controls and Mac resolution
Hopefully this means Catalyst apps will feel a little more like actual Mac apps.
I have invested quite a bit into the Mac/Apple ecosystem. A big part of that reason was the longevity of the hardware, along with good resale values.
I hope they do right by their existing Mac customers. As of right now I don't have a strong reason to switch away.
I also hope that Apple does not blow this transition from a quality perspective. Their design choices and attention to detail have left a quite a few things to be desired in the past few generations of hardware.
As for the quality, reply hazy, ask again later? The whole butterfly keyboard of laptops turned out to be a fiasco, and Apple's long-held tendency to push their industrial design right to the edge of thermal and material tolerances got kind of crazy-making in the last few years. Yet so far, I'm really liking my MacBook Air 2020, and the only thing I'd absolutely change about it if I were given a magic wand would be to add a third USB-C port on the right-hand side. I appreciated much of Jony Ive's design work, but I'm hopeful that with him gone, the drive to prioritize minimalism over functionality will be at least toned down.
I agree with this. There's a big difference between Intel -> ARM and PPC -> Intel too: With PPC -> Intel, they were moving from their own special architecture towards the mainstream architecture that everybody else was using. In this case they're leaving an architecture that is likely to remain highly relevant outside of the Apple bubble for a long time to come.
Well, given that demand for x86 probably won't go away in 3-5 years and that Apple generally makes it impossible to downgrade OSX on new machines, dropping x86 support might actually increase the resale value of existing hardware.
The only way this can work if they implement USB 4. That's earlier than expected but not by much. USB 4 came out last September and everyone was guesstimating 18 months before the first systems ship with it. AMD shipping it with the Ryzen 4xxx laptop chips would've been a really big win but apparently it was too early. And now, as with Thunderbolt, it seems Apple will be the first.
As far as I understand these things, you can connect a TB3 device to a full featured USB 4 port (which Intel plans to market as TB4 just to increase confusion as if there isn't of that around USB C). Not necessarily the other way around: the USB 4 bus while compatible with the TB3 bus, can contain USB packets, TB3 only carried PCIe and DP packets.
Areca has an amazing SAN-in-a-box product: it's a 24 bay 4U RAID box which allows as many as nine TB3 hosts to connect to it at the same time and it's immensely popular with various movie / TV show production. It's less than 10K USD which is an absolute bargain for the capabilities. Consider the 2K price of just one 40gbps Ethernet to TB3 adapter which you'd need for a traditional SAN.
Devices like these make TB3 compatibility an absolute must for Macbooks.
Now that they're going down the path towards controlling everything in their computer hardware, I can see Apple creating a new proprietary high performance interface to replace TB and use USB for everything else that requires interoperability.
The DTK has two USB-C ports (10 Gbps) and two USB-A Ports (5 Gbps) - so, they definitely have a USB story.
Which is interesting, because the Pro XDR Display can only be driven TB3 [1].
So Apple figured out the licensing for a TB3 controller chip to work in this design (which funny enough would be licensing that IP from Intel), or they are using USB4/TB4, or something else I'm not smart enough to think of.
Can a JIT be static? Isn't that not possible by definition?
But to answer your question, yes a JIT can be static. JIT just means that the compilation happens at runtime, and "static" in this context means that the compilation is happening at the very start of runtime. You could imagine a JIT that compiles all bytecode to native code immediately on launch. The reason this technique is not used often is that it tends to lead to long startup times. But if the result is cached somewhere then it might be acceptable.
They literally showed a demo of Parallels with Ubuntu for Intel running inside it.
Much like the 2015 Macbook Pro I expect you'll be able sell it for more than you paid for it years later.
Apple was already grumpy about servicing it by 2018 or so though, even with AppleCare. (I've switched to Windows now.)
I am pleased I didn't splurge for the 32GB of RAM, however. I'll do that with my next one.
It's still as powerful as any of the current Apple laptops - progress has been slow these last 6 years.
It may depend on one's definition of "limited": the Rosetta was first released with Mac OS 10.4 in 2005, [1][2] and was last available in Mac OS 10.6, which first released in 2010, [3] but whose last update was in 2011.
Six years of transitional support is not unreasonable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
New software will be cross-compiled with both instruction sets:
But I know a lot of people still run Windows because they want the Windows version of an app, either because it isn't available at all on Mac or just because the Windows version runs better (Excel was a classic example of this for a long time, might still be). In that case, I don't know if that same translation layer will have the same performance (if it can run at all outside of MacOS) when running an entirely different OS.
I think this is called "transpiling" -- a version of compiling that's mainly translating from another architecture. And it didn't sound from their description like it was JIT -- it sounded like it would do the transpile when you first installed it (or maybe first ran it?) and keep the results.
And they have a first pass AOT, with a JIT backup from the sounds of it to support JITs like browsers, node, and java.
VS is not even 64-bit yet...
[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/tag/1.46.1 (basically just MS source minus branding)
VS Code was expected to run on anything, being nothing more than Javascript & HTML wrapped via Electron.
Of course VS Code works on ARM, it's an electron app.
(I recently tried to install Zoom on arm64 Debian and it didn’t go so well... Rstudio wasn’t even close to an option)
Zoom, Bluejeans, Dropbox, pretty much all the popular apps I used where I could find a Linux version for my Dell laptop, I couldn't find a way (though got close at least, with Dropbox) to run them on an ARM64 CPU.
Lots of games work fine with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4aGNqZ724
This announcement is the final nail in the coffin I suppose. I hope some company will come out with great quality, well-designed, minimal laptops. That run Linux perfectly.
Many people who want dual boot Windows/ Macs want them for games and gamers want the sort of performance you don't get with emulation.
Windows has always been cross-platform, x86, MIPS, Alpha and PPC back in the day. There was even a SPARC build at one point.
I suspect developers running VMs with Linux on them is far more common than developers running Windows VMs. Likely by an order of magnitude. Web developers want Linux VMs, Windows developer have Windows laptops.
Sure, but the number of people writing cross platform apps is a small fraction of the number of web developers out there.
Additionally, there's the Android/iOS crowd in the same boat, where emulation of non x86 in Android dev is pretty limited (but I can see that being rectified with the newer virtualization extensions).
You mean that they opened and could run a command line app? I'm not actually sure they implied it was x86.
In this case, I don't think the first ARM Macs will have undesirable hardware ala the first few years of Touchbar Macs, but there will be some straggler software whose ARM ports will be delayed or will never happen. For those who depend upon that software, the final Intel Macs will be invaluable.
Apple released a bunch of PPC Macs after they announced the switch to Intel, so this isn't unprecedented.
Apple announced the PPC in 1994 and sold new 68K Macs for 3 years at least.
To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won't be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread.
Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales.
History is repeating itself, it's worth reviewing the previous transitions before making assumptions.
- https://everymac.com/mac-answers/macintel-faq/why-did-apple-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...
- https://tedium.co/2020/06/16/apple-powerpc-intel-transition-...
I think quite a few developers would be happy to use the same basic software stack on on a phone app and a laptop app.
Now, though, suddenly I need to figure out how NEON works if I want to continue to support professional users on MacOS. I need to increase my hardware costs to ensure adequate test coverage. I need to use something other than Intel's glorious VTune for profiling & optimization. When I'm step-debugging my C++ or assembly tight-loops, I need to know double the amount of assembly than I do today. I need to learn ARM's memory model & cache behaviors.
If I'm just writing some silly native app that could have been a website as is trendy then yeah this is all no big deal, who cares? But if you're really pushing professional app boundaries, where time is money? That's a different story.
Just because your use case is different from those who have C or C++ code and a good optimizing compiler doesn't mean you need to disparage every other type of developer on the planet.
There are a lot of people who write native ARM for phones and tablets for performance purposes, too. Some of them get down into ARM assembly. If they port to Intel and want to do assembly-level things there, they need to learn twice as much assembly coming the other direction.
Is the future more like Intel desktops or more like ARM-based mobile devices? If you think the latter then Apple is definitely moving towards where people will be (insert Gretzky quote: "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.)
Apple's focus has always been the consumer market, and for most consumers, they're not likely to notice the platform change.
One might say, Apple gained a huge developer demographic when it moved to x64 from PowerPC, won't this matter to them? But most of those developers were creative types that don't work at the binary level anyway. If you're doing front-end web dev on VS Code and almost never fire up gcc/clang, your life isn't going to be impacted significantly.
Those whose lives were impacted (e.g. scientific computing folks who struggled to get certain Linux-specific software to compile on what was a BSD-ish platform) have probably moved off the Apple platform and on to Intel Linux years ago or at least they're likely to be running a Linux VM on their Macbook Pros. (homebrew doesn't really cut it)
Also unlike back in the day when most people were still running desktop apps, so much of what we do on a daily basis is on the browser nowadays. Calendar? Cloud-based. Email? Cloud-based. Word processor/spreadsheet/presentation? Cloud-based -- and Microsoft Office is being ported to ARM. We're living in much more platform-agnostic world than we were even 10 years ago.
I expect the x64 to ARM transition to be seamless to most people who are currently on the macOS platform.
A bunch of Python wheels might need to be recompiled though.
I completely agree with you IF Apple contains this to just the Macbook market. If they push this to iMac Pro / Mac Pro, too, though? Or even Macbook Pro? That's a different story. For developers it probably won't matter much, but for users currently relying on things like Protools to make a living? There's a good chance this won't be a friendly transition to them in the short term.
If not, there will be Universal 2 binaries with both x64/Intel binaries for a while and an emulation mode for legacy binaries. Underoptimized at first? Maybe, but they work well enough and performance catches up eventually -- the transition is over 2 years. Same situation as before. Software that work will continue to work on existing and new hardware for a while. Nothing is going to stop working the moment the new processors come out.
We've seen all this happen before (m68k - PowerPC - Intel). And it's really not a problem.
They aren’t rushing x64 out the door.
(that probably totally depends on whether Intel actually designs a desktop chip for the first time in nearly two decades, rather than continuing with their current sell server chips as poorly designed desktops path)
They're just trying not to Osbourne themselves too badly. They want you to keep buying Intel Macs, but who's to say how long they'll keep support.
No thanks, switching back to Linux. I'm done with this crap.
Did they say that in the keynote?
(Also, it's not really like Apple to acknowledge competition in this space, especially anyone using non-native toolkits. They're not going to mention people writing Electron apps in the WWDC keynote, right?)
Edit: This touches a lot of areas, like auto-detection and configuration of hardware and sub-components (either connected or embedded into the SoC) or security specific areas like ARM TrustZone which has vendor specific implementations and secure boot procedures
Maybe, maybe not. Where did you hear that?
I have heard this claim for 10 years now. Still hasn't come true.
It'll happen, eventually, when the open source community will reverse engineer them and find how to "jailbreak" them.
They didn't demo gaming to suggest this is a great machine for gaming, they demoed it to show that it was possible at all. The previous version of Rosetta during the PowerPC->Intel transition was not known for performance.
If gaming is important to you and you want a Mac then you want an Intel Mac or whatever games are released for Mac ARM. Emulated games are not going to compete with native.
It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
Having gone and checked, no. Not even close.
(Nor would it be plausible to expect to. But it's clear Apple have made a choice here, and that is that if you're a user who wants legacy software or desktop gaming, Apple do not care about you compared to their margins. It's that simple.)
> You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
You mean the Surface Pro X? It has similar price tiering to the iPad Pro whose SoC was used in these demos.
Still, the Pro X has poor graphics. I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise.
They said exactly what SoC they were using, and it's not known to have spare PCIe lanes lying unused in existing products. Apple pretty much just demoed an x86 game running on an overclocked iPad Pro.
Don't be surprised if there is no Thunderbolt 3 at all, but just USB-C.
Makes me wonder how the Pro Display used in the demos was being driven. DisplayPort with USB-C alternate mode?
Were you under the impression this $500 developers kit shipping with an iPad Pro CPU/ GPU is a high end computer? While it's a decent chip, it's essentially the same CPU as the prior generation iPad Pro with 1 additional core.
It's not impressive at all.
---
Edit 2: Please disregard my first edit, below—I was right the first time, then I got the games mixed up.
Edit 1: Oh wait, I forgot, SotTR actually did have an Xbox 360 port! It was one of the last big titles to have one. I think what they showed on screen looked better than the 360 version though, although it's admittedly hard to tell on a stream.
Whereas I can emulate 4k60fps PS3 games with improved textures.
It did not, previous game in series (Rise of the Tomb Raider) did have but Shadow(...) was released only on current-gen consoles.
An unlocked A12Z is likely all you can get away with in a laptop, and inferior to SOTA x86 low power CPUs.
Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used.
If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them.
Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don't think they need to
*edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/WEB-PAGES/Batc...
I'm not a developer myself, but When I engaging with them on various OSS projects I always feel Windows is being treated as a second class citizen in almost every aspect (smaller projects often has no test, tool chain setup, tutorial, or all of above for Windows, as a starter).
In fact, the fastest (#1 Top500 as of June 2020 https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2020/06/) super computer in the world, and one of the most efficient (#9 Green500 as of June 2020 https://www.top500.org/lists/green500/2020/06/), uses ARM CPUs and has an implementation of these for them.
Also Apple is committing to a long term pipeline of Intel chips. This makes sense since so many apps will take years to transition. At the same time, they're willing to put their own chips side by side with Intel and they believe people will voluntarily switch. I'm looking forward to the benchmarks.
Reportedly 4th as Intel is supposedly trying once again for that market.
So maybe, they certainly have the budget to try.
And charge you a bunch for the whole package, of course.
Probably only focused on the iGPU segment.
That's not how it works. ARM is just the processor architecture. While Linux may very well support the processor, it's unlikely to support the rest of the hardware well, if at all.
But my question/point was, is there likely to a total show stopper now that you can't just tolerate?
Intel has been giving developers free libraries for many years which use code specifically optimized for Intel processors. It seems likely that any app that uses one of these libraries will break. Even if Apple's emulator or compiler can work around these optimizations, Intel might release new versions of the libraries that will not work on an ARM processor.
Also, even ordinary changes to MacOS tend to break music apps and plugins. I would expect a change to a new CPU architecture to cause havoc there.
Any app that uses assembly code optimizations that use unique Intel instructions seems likely to break as well. Maybe Apple has perfectly emulated all Intel CPU instructions, but that seems very complex and how often does new complex software work perfectly? Having to buy/upgrade apps to run on ARM may be necessary. And will drivers for USB and thunderbolt peripherals all just work on ARM?
Is this goodbye to choosing your own operating system now? Are the only people Apple cares about web and app developers? Are kernel engineers forgotten about? What about low-level hackers who like to tinker with their hardware or poke around in UEFI?
I'm more worried than excited about this.
The problem with being able to tinker at will with a consumer system is that you have no way of choosing who is tinkering with your system.
If as a vendor you take the security and privacy of your customers' information seriously, you cannot deliver an "open" and "tinkerable" system. The two are fundamentally at odds.
This has been sufficiently obvious for long enough now that anyone still complaining about how they can't run their own kernel on their desktop is almost certainly a surveillance-state troll.
Think about android smartphones for instance. I can't simply load up a new operating system by downloading the .iso file into my phone and boot into the boot selection menu just by holding down a correct button combination. No, you have to go through custom ROMs, shifty looking Russian/Chinese forums, sometimes you even have to send a kind email to your phone manufacturer to get a key so that you can load a custom ROM onto your phone.
I mean, it's bad enough already on Android. But don't you know how absolutely impossible it is on iOS? I literally buy a computer (an iPhone), and I cannot write my own programs and run them on my new computer. Is this the company we can trust with such a major transition into a new platform and architecture? How on earth can I trust Apple so that they don't require me to literally jailbreak a macbook so that I can install another operating system?
Christ, look at how annoying newer versions of Mac OS are! Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. It's a real effort to get control of your own computer back.
There's a reason some of us still run Linux. Got a binary? Run it. Just like that. No messing about. I can never trust Apple to make it as simple as this.
> Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day.
If you really know what you are doing, you should know how to disable and enable SIP.
The transition from x86 to ARM gives them the opportunity to impose these restrictions. Back in the day, companies wouldn't even dream of trying to pull something as radical as this, but now that we've had a decade of smartphones proving how you can get away with not allowing customers to install their own operating system on their phone, the leverage is there. It's not ARM itself that worries me, it's the transition from x86 to anything (POWER9, ARM, etc.)
https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/
"Submit a brief application for an opportunity to join the program. Selected developers will receive a link to order the Universal App Quick Start Program from the online Apple Store. Priority will be given to applicants with an existing macOS application, as availability is limited."
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...
That sounds ambitious as the bigger Apple desktop machines are quite powerful. But suppose you could just fit them with multiple chips.
> Section 2.2 No Other Permitted Uses
> ... You agree that neither You nor Your Authorized Developers will:
> ...
> (d) display, demonstrate, video, photograph, make any drawings or renderings of, or take any images or measurements of or run any benchmark tests on the Developer Transition Kit (or allow anyone else to do any of the foregoing), unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;
> (e) discuss, publicly write about, or post any reactions to or about the Developer Transition Kit (or Your use of the Developer Transition Kit), whether online, in print, in person, or on social media, unless separately authorized in writing by Apple;
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/terms/universal-app-quick-start-...
If they came out and said here's an open Mac platform with the ability to run macOS, Windows or Linux , open hardware specs, open source drivers and the ability to install whatever you want wherever you want it, I think most people will back it even though initially it'll be painful from a performance and transition standpoint.
But knowing Apple of the recent past or just be more and more closed, limited and Apple or nothing deal.
Also that would not preclude them from being financially where they want to be - more Macs sold at Apple premium - even if they are to run Windows and Linux - still means more Apple hardware sales and more money.
On one side, I think this switch is a good thing for the industry, as I always believed that ARM was a better choice and that we should get rid of the legacy at some point.
On the other hand, Apple is again tempted to play in their own garden, with a complete disregard of standards and interoperability. They're doing that with Metal, they will certainly do the same with their custom silicon.
The best fit is for Macbooks I think - low power and being able to run iOS software is pretty nice.
For real heavy lifting (6k or 8k editing in Resolve, with raw video codecs, or heavy duty 3D tasks) I don't think I'll be changing from a desktop with AMD Ryzen and top end Nvidia in the next 2 years. Apple high end GPUs in particular are a question mark.
But Apple will probably get there eventually with their own chips - would not put it past them.
If anything, he debunked his own theory with that experiment.
Perhaps it's just to temper expectations then. If the performance or user experience isn't comparable to what today's users expect, it's probably better not to celebrate that use case.
Nobody who has ever attempted to use it would claim this.
I've stopped doing that years ago. No need now - if you want to play Windows games, buy a PC - it's a lot cheaper.
I used Parallels for a while, and it was great, but then we kind of standardized on VirtualBox at work. It was okay.
But then our dev environments got too big to run on laptops, so now they're all cloud-hosted VMs. We still run Docker (which uses a VM under the covers for Mac) but that uses Apple's Hypervisor framework and isn't really "user-facing" virtualization.
Especially – and funnily enough – in business contexts, where you need to run software which are each only available on either Mac or Windows, but not both.
Not all packages are available in ARM flavors.
Or at least that's what I hope ;-) I'm relying on running x86 Windows and Linux within Parallels in addition to native MacOS Apps to do my daily work, which involves compiling and testing x86 binaries for these platforms, so whether this virtualization thing actually runs x86 OSes transparently is an absolute make-or-break feature for me to continue my usage of the MacOS platform for work.
Sandbag the upgrade for the 13" so it's not that desirable and you won't cannibalize your own demand for the release of the first Apple Silicon machine
They'll win anyway. But comparing a 2021-ish Apple ARM laptop against intel's early 2019 chip isn't particularly fair.
People will see the benchmark as a blow to intel (and it is), but the fair benchmarks would be a 2021 ARM mac against the best intel has to offer
Also given Apple's recent MacBook track record, the first version of ARM Macs may not be as much of a slam dunk as people hope.
I know the 2016-2020 macs are pretty much terrible for Linux anyway due to hardware issues (audio, keyboard, wifi....) so it's no surprise there - but I fear this shift to "Apple Silicon" effectively kills it.
Maybe one more release until they're merged completely.
That's more than twice as long as the transition from PPC. Sounds like they've not yet figured out how to do high-end. Hopefully, they won't be as quick to drop support on the $6k 2019 Mac Pro as they were on the 2005 Power Mac G5 quad (<4 years from release to unsupported by OS X).
You're gonna see macs across the line being moved over to Apple chips Q4 and Q1
Whether that's good for consumers remains to be seen -- I fear it may lead to Macs whose architecture is locked down in a manner similar to iOS devices. That would be a worrying trend.
It's amazing that in their history of making computers Apple has used the 6502/65816, the 68k series, the PowerPC, and now ARM. And along the way there were backwards compatibility options for all of them (although not many people bought and used the Apple II compatibility cards for the Mac, they were really two separate user bases).
It is kind of satisfying in a way to see the ARM architecture come full circle and back to the 'home computer' segment it started in. I look forward to seeing someone port RISC-OS to a Mac, I'm sure it will happen. :-)
I don’t know what other people consider as the lifetime of a Mac (meaning the number of years they’d use a still-working Mac before deciding to buy a new one), but I do wonder just how long Apple’s promise of “supporting Intel Macs for years to come” will turn out to be. Things are surely a lot different now than they were in 2005, especially with much better hardware (and the full transition to 64 bit everywhere).
The demo of Rosetta 2, however convoluted or staged it may have seemed to some, was quite impressive to me.
For me, running Windows in a VM was the killer Mac app. There's always one or two Windows applications that don't have good Mac equivalents. I spent a good portion of my career as a Windows developer working on Mac with a Windows VM.
"Apple's initial press release indicated the transition would begin by June 2006, and finish by the end of 2007, but it actually proceeded much more quickly. The first generation Intel-based Macintoshes were released in January 2006 with Mac OS X 10.4.4 Tiger, and Steve Jobs announced the last models to switch in August 2006, with the Mac Pro available immediately and with the Intel Xserve available by October 2006.[2] The Xserve servers were available in December 2006.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_...
If more software developers now need to target ARM architecture, does that mean that it will be easier to port software to other hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi, or is it not that simple?
As for the pro software that currently requires a physical dongle for DRM, I'm guessing those vendors will be forced into the Mac App Store with Apple managing access to the software for them.
It will be interesting if one very big company can keep the whole stack going.. Even ps4/xbox went to the common architecture of x86. It could pay off big in price/performance but its risky..
after waiting for years for anyone to replace x86, with a better design, nobody could (Not even intel).
Top left on the arch slide: audio engine. Other on-chip blocks: camera compute, neural engine, machine learning accelerator.
This is about advancing the state of the art in personal digital assistants. The Mac change is in service of the iPhone.
I'm excited. Digital assisstants have stagnated for a long time, because of internet latency and lack of dedicated silicon (and perhaps privacy concerns). This is the way forward.
- Apple being hostile to developers: app approvals (Hey)
- Apple hardware being hard or impossible to upgrade
- MacOS turning into iOS (don't want)
But Hey! isn’t free, they just charge you using a different platform. Maybe 30% is too much for Apple to charge them, but zero percent is definitely too low.
The payment processor argument means you really don’t have any clue to what Apple App Store services are or do.
Apple/ARM = best now, because Apple's vast capital from iPhone success has allowed it to build a world-class CPU engineering team from scratch. Building the end products at the same company gives them integration that can't be matched by other companies.
I’m worried it will bring even more close control by them of what we run and how we run it on those computers, but having lots of custom chips (many of them in one package) for all kinds of things with a unified memory architecture is amazing, a modern AMIGA.
Even if Apple did sell their chips to other parties, Qualcomm will be still collecting its sweet patent royalty from both parties, so it couldn't care less.
Of course even if Apple did start selling those chips (which they won't) they would charge an arm and a leg for them, because they could. They would only be used in the top of the line flagship phones. Apple has shown zero interest in competing with the bargain basement hardware producers.
Generally, yes. But we're talking about Qualcomm [1] here.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-sho...
I'm sure anything close to the same performance as the Intel chips will have better battery life, especially since they can put in as fine-grained support for throttling and idling as they want. These should cost them loads less per unit than what Intel's selling them, too. They could cut prices a bit and still have higher margins.
So they will gain a bit with a product laser focused on its market, but alongside that, they won't be paying the kings ransom intel wants for a couple additional cores, or a couple Mhz boost. So they can simplify the binning into best in class, and good yields for the volume product, and pocket the margins on the best in class product segment rather than giving it all to intel.
Why would I say that? Because the assumption desktop developers have made for decades is that Wintel/Lintel is the norm, everything else is a side dish. And Macs since their Intel shift have conformed to this, if not in terms of API, then certainly in the core architecture decisions. And that means that you design the software "for x86". If you try to run Linux software on a Chromebook you'll often have a nasty experience with these assumptions making things break. And nobody is paying much attention to Win10 on ARM chips.
But now you have a top-down mandate from Apple, which is in a strong position to direct the desktop platform again, possibly the strongest it's ever had. Everyone who follows Apple knows that they tend to obsolete things quickly; they have played this game before. The move they've made is to usher all the developers, not just the mobile ones, to ARM. And that means throwing out a substantial part of old codebases optimized for many generations of Intel chips. It pressures the Linux junkies to be more cross-platform, which in turn topples over some assumptions around Linux desktops themselves. The major distributions will scramble to support Apple hardware.
And a consequence of the assumptions in Linux changing is that you can start doing some ground-up rethinking too. "We're redoing this part of the codebase, let's change the design." And with Apple support may also come Surface support, Chromebook support - giving all the ARM platforms equal treatment. So it's likely that multiple operating systems will see a generational shift, not just Apple's. A big chain of events that will explode some projects and leave others untouched.
And then at the end of that, we might have RISC-V hardware coming over the horizon.
I'm guessing that when the "two year" transition to all-ARM arch on the mac is complete, they'll merge them.
I thought the Mac was amazing back in the mid-80s. I was very impressed with the ipod touch and ipad. I owned an early unibody macbook pro. I can understand the benefits of the closed platform with everything micro-managed by Apple. But it is suffocating. I am more than willing to give up trivial advantages for relatively open hardware platforms and software.
I was having intermittent xfiniti issues during the stream.
I guess this also means Catalyst’s life span is pretty short and SwiftUI will becomes the focus?
I started a new iOS app recently, and there was essentially no cost to building for catalyst.
I am using SwiftUI and I considered targetting MacOS directly, but the extra work wasn’t worth it at this stage.
I think catalyst is the new Cocoa - it will grow to consume all of MacOS.
I wonder what that means. There's more to the chip -- what about the core APIs for UI? Does that mean CocoaTouch and UIKit will run natively on macOS?
Virtualization gives us Linux ARM docker images, which is nice, but not the same as running the same Linux docker images that run on the cloud. (while ARM in the cloud can be an option, it is a whole different topic)
The developers will have to find and develop with the ARM equivalent docker image of their production x86 ones, which will make the local dev and production environment unnecessarily more distant.
The good news is that the Docker ecosystem has a relatively broad ARM architecture support, but still, this will be a significant difference with prod environments.
The PS5 apparently has incredible disk I/O, possible due to RAD's compression technology. A super fast compression codec could make a difference too.
I guess we won't have to imagine long, though, since that's exactly what we'll see with the developer kit. Can't wait to see benchmarks of those.
"Developers can start building apps today and first system ships by year’s end, beginning a two-year transition"
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...
Think about the iPhone SE and how it is supposed to strengthen Apple bottom line on the long run, its more about the recurrent revenue from services than the one shot from hardware.
For references in no configuration of the current Mac mini can you drive an XDR without the use of an eGPU thanks to the extremely limited integrated intel graphics.
I thought maybe Intel was losing ground to TSMC for cultural reasons – being the best while being based in the US is getting harder and harder. But I'm not sure.
PS All those sleeping bugs from C code that was never tested on weaker memory models...
UPDATE: I don't mean the developer transition kit that has a Mac mini with an A12Z, I mean the first consumer macOS device/macBook
Pretty great for development long term.
The only annoyance is their refusal to refund Windows tax. But now Lenovo partnered with RedHat/IBM and started selling some laptops with Linux pre-installed (Fedora), so you can avoid Windows tax there, even if you don't plan to use Fedora. I hope that will eventually extend to all their models.
But developing for iOS also requires a bunch more than just developing for iOS. Mobile apps often require servers, and Apple doesn't have a server product any more, so it's in Apple's best interest to allow stuff like Docker (which, you'll remember, they specifically demoed).
Now imagine the iPhone's CPU with double the cores and a giant heatsink + fan. I bet it would double maybe even triple a maxed out MacBook's score.
On the other hand, most software does not utilize ARM's NEON instructions (counterpart to x86 AVX). In my tests [1], H.265 software encoding was 3.5 slower on ARM than on x86 in terms of frames encoded per watt of energy consumed.
[1] https://quanticdev.com/articles/h265-encoding-on-arm-cpus
It’ll require some kind of emulation now to run x86/AMD64 instructions on this architecture if I correctly understand the changes happening.
I’m saddened about that. I liked being able to boot my MacBook pro into Windows for games.
My main machine is a 5K iMac which should last me for a couple more years for web dev.
I would get rid of my non-work 13inch mbp if this was the case.
What scares me though is expanding of walled gardens of apple. Mac used to give back to libre culture at least a little bit and push some valuable standards but with native iPhone apps and this closed architecture I'm afraid it will take away from libre and desktop culture. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing we'll have to see but I'm staying optimistic.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out in practice.
Seems like it's still possible if Microsoft gets on board. They've already made investments in getting Windows 10 to run on Qualcomm's ARM-based Snapdragon processor.
> Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux.
How does it relate to the switch to ARM?
Did they get finally worried about success of WSL on Windows and aim to compete in that area?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...
"What would keep Apple from shipping machines with both ARM and Intel CPUs in them? The ARM CPU would run the OS and decide when to ship jobs over to the Intel CPU. I can’t imagine that the home-grown ARM CPU would add much to the total price of the computer."
It would restrict it so you can never remove the Intel CPU. It is best to just emulate the Intel CPU for a while until everyone ports their code across.
Maybe Apple adds the i86 instruction set as a module in their SOCs, but they aren’t paying intel CPU prices on their ARM Macs.
Oh well, I got excited for a minute there.
Would it ever make sense for apple to do that?
Apple: Here we demonstrate desktop Photoshop running on ARM.
The Verge: Write it down.. write it down!!
:)
What's the best non-Apple notebook these days?
Every other major hardware company plays it safe by supporting as much of their user base as they possibly can with a wide variety of configurations. Apple doesn't.
That's pretty subjective depending on operating system and use case. If you want Linux, Dell makes some really good options (XPS Developer Edition), System76 and Purism make some nice hardware for libre software purists.
For Windows laptops there are tons of options and it all boils down to thermal performance and power versus weight and expense. No notebook will defy the laws of physics so there are trade-offs, especially when you start wanting to play games, which I have generally found just isn't worth the trouble on a laptop. Dell's XPS and Lenovo's Thinkpad lines are solid in terms of providing options that fit a lot of different use cases.
I've found that the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 environment is great for a lot of the command line Linuxy stuff I took for granted in MacOS. Apple's hardware used to be my default option for computing on the go while I would use native Linux on my desktop, because so much of my development stuff requires some flavor of Linux compatibility. Now, with WSL2, Windows works perfectly for what I need. Microsoft's Linux support is so good that I would not buy another Apple laptop if I were in the market now (it feels really weird typing that) - there is just nothing justifying Apple's premium price anymore, for the type of work I do (YMMV).
The thing that's different about buying non-Apple computing hardware is that you have many more options. Apple takes kind of a dictatorial role in giving you one option at any given screen size or price point. Want a GPU? Buy a 16" Macbook Pro. Want a desktop class CPU? Buy an iMac (or spend $10k+ on a reasonably spec'ed Mac Pro). People put up with this in large part because of Apple's marketing. MacOS Catalina was a disaster but at this point a lot of people have low grade Stockholm syndrome. The relationship is totally different on the PC side where you can practically find anything to match whatever particular use case you have; there are a lot more options, and you have a more active role in figuring that out and purchasing what works for you.
This is a developer-only concern.
The thought experiment is probably moot anyway though, as Apple probably won't allow any kernels that haven't been signed by them to be booted like on their iOS devices.
The general picture I've gotten is that the T2 is probably significantly less capable of surveillance than, say, the IME. This talk [1] for example suggests (but doesn't rule out explicitly as far as I can tell) that the T2 is not connected to the PCIe interfaces for network cards, which significantly reduces the extent to which the T2 could autonomously phone home what it could learn through its direct storage access and connection to the CPU.
And yikes! No unsigned kernels would be pretty bad. I certainly wouldn't be buying if that's the case :(
- Can the apps downloaded from a website run.
- Can x64/x86 apps both work
- Can I run Excel 2013/Old windows games on Windows XP on Parallels
Apple has deliberately added 'notarization' to try and control the platform as a bout of a landgrap using the ARM transition as an opportunity.
Intel is losing to AMD's Zen and TSMC process nodes.
I'm curious about the future, especially games, if they want to take on consoles.
PS4 and XboxOne are 7 years old and while the next gen looks really good Apple can refresh the productline much quicker (on the other hand it's a good question if people really would want to buy a new console say every year because Apple sure will be aggressive pushing out new models much more frequently)
With touch controls on non-touchscreen devices.
It isn't big.
I think the fact they chose to show off a fairly poorly running version of Tomb Raider as their demo goes to show that they still fundamentally do not understand the gaming market.
Also, the PowerPC macs weren't their chips, those were IBM and Motorola for the most part (Apple did have some input into Altivec, but didn't do anything from the RTL down AFAIK).
If another company were to try this without a warchest the size of Apple's, they'd be sued into oblivion.
They aren’t even running any Intel instructions.
Made in China or the USA?
(Taiwan’s constitution technically defines it as part of China, but it operates as a separate country for all practical purposes).
They did the same thing with PPC versions of macOS before the Intel transition.
Yes, and then you ‘upgraded’ the OS and gratuitously stopped running older software. My final Mac Pro — yes, I was a buyer of Mac Pro grade hardware — still runs 10.6.8 for that reason.
All this to say, to repro my setup with Linux and another brand of intel powered machine, I'll waste an amazing amount of time. Intel is not going anywhere. They might have missed a beat or two, but they will pump out the best CPUs again in a short time. AMD got the upper hand for while back when the transition to x64 happened with the first real dual cores. Intel is not looking great right now I'll give you that, but chances are they will come back. Maybe. But in any case, this is a "if it works dont fix it". This CPU change will force a bunch of ppl to fix something that worked.
However Apple comes across as cruel when they make decisions like these, which break software distributability of things like native machine learning code. For example one build system that enables that use case is: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
At best these new POWER or ARM architecture Apple PCs are going to be like a C-class Mercedes. So I'm honestly not that concerned. Having distributable open source executables support them shouldn't be that difficult, it's just that it'd add bloat and require trading away important parts of Von Neumman architecture, such as self-modifying code, in order to be done easily.
If Apple wasn't being goofballs, they would have taken into consideration that the x86_64 patents should expire around this year, so Apple could have just as easily adapted the POWER design of which IBM divested themselves, to support x86, by simply bolting on a code morphing layer like Xed. Since it'd be pretty great to be able to buy an Apple PC that doesn't have MINIX lurking inside the chip, without making tradeoffs that could be most accurately described as breaking open source software to save money.
How many devs actually have the setup in place to use a non mobile device?
I also wonder if the current+last gen iPad Pro that has the new keyboard + trackpad case will gain the ability to run Xcode and native macOS apps in the near future.