Macintel: The End Is Nigh
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It would be worse in almost every aspect.
The cost wouldn't change much, and Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch. The cited CPU cost is the suggested retail price. Apple's volume lets them negotiate huge discounts.
Battery life would go up a bit, but battery life is already pretty good on Apple laptops. My 2013 11" Air gets 8 hours easily, but can go as long as 12 or as short as 2 depending on screen brightness and CPU usage. Unless you're keeping the CPU busy, the screen is the biggest consumer of power. Cutting CPU power consumption in half would only increase battery life by 20-ish%.
The PowerPC to Intel transition worked for several reasons. Most importantly, Intel CPUs were much faster than PowerPC. In everyday usage, the fastest ARM chips are 10x slower than a quad-core Haswell. Moving to x86 also increased the features of Macs, allowing them to dual-boot Windows and efficiently virtualize other x86-based OSes. Switching to ARM would backtrack on both fronts. An ARM-based Apple laptop would have no boot camp, no Windows virtualization, and no efficient emulation of legacy applications.
CPUs are only a small part of why tablets have longer battery life than laptops. Tablets have no keyboard, trackpad, or hinge, so they can basically be a giant battery with a screen attached. The iPad has a bigger battery than the 11" MacBook Air, despite the Air weighing 50% more and taking up 30% more volume. (Edit: This has recently changed. The 11" Air has a 38 watt-hour battery. The iPad 3 and 4 had a 42 watt-hour battery, but the iPad Air has a 32 watt-hour battery. Still, it's even smaller than the earlier iPads, massing less than half the 11" Air.)
In short, it doesn't seem worthwhile to do all this work and sacrifice so much performance for some incremental increases in battery life and profit.
Anecdotally I know for me, this would cause me to move from a top of the line Macbook Pro Retina to an Air or even a mini. Time and market has changed to where having a mac is a must for me as a professional developer but I won't spend 3K on a single machine whose primary differentiator is ability to compile iOS applications.
I do agree that the ~10W you'd save by using an A7 versus an 4250U in a Mackbook Air would be a false economy.
EDIT: To explain that bit about targeted power ranges a bit more, to hit high frequencies at a given process node (like 45 nm or whatever) you need to break up your logic into a fairly high number of simple stages separated by clock driven latches. A core that doesn't worry about hitting high frequencies can divide up it's logic into fewer stages, simplifying design and requiring fewer transistors for latching.
[1]http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...
That would still be noticeably slower for native software, and unbearable for anything run under emulation. It would also be very painful for use cases such as people wanting occasional Windows applications or Linux VMs.
Whatever the exact number, it doesn't invalidate the point I was making: Switching to ARM will ruin performance for x86 programs, which need to be emulated. ARM has to be significantly faster than x86, or else the emulation overhead will make users hate the transition.
This is a huge challenge for the Mac Pro and rMBP, which are all about performance. Generally, a given microarchitecture can only scale TDP by a factor of 10 by changing frequency and number of cores. Satisfying the pro line would require a new microarchitecture. Considering an x86 to ARM transition would take 1-2 years, that's asking a lot of Apple's chip designers. If Apple was going to go through all the trouble of building a new ARM core for high-performance, high-TDP applications, they might as well build their own x86 CPU. It would save a transition and the necessary emulation overhead. They could roll it out for the MacBook Airs first, then address the Pro line at their leisure (or not and just use Intel CPUs).
x86 computers could continue to exist for high-end users, but typical-users might be content with a hybrid tablet/computer. As ARM increased in power, x86 might dissapear entirely.
Your comments on Windows compatibility/virtualization are spot on. Cloud streaming, Citrix/XenApp, can help in some situations here. In a few years virtually all major apps will probably be cloud/browser based (Microsoft Office, Adobe Suite, streaming games/apps, etc). Windows on Mac might not be as important then. It's possible Microsoft might release ARM Windows too (besides RT). If ARM gets popular in the datacenter you may see Windows Server 2015 ARM Edition. They've done this in the past with Itanium.
The number of users who would actually benefit from OS X vs iOS, but would not be ticked off at an inability to dual boot Windows or run any legacy applications, is very small indeed.
iOS for ARM and OS X for x86 seems likely to remain in the future, but I do think that Apple could do a netbook or dockable tablet running ARM/iOS if they really thought there was demand. I'm not sure there is, but if the product was good enough they have shown in the past an ability to manufacture demand where it didn't exist previously...
So yeah, if it is, in fact, a useful form factor (and I have my doubts) it's in the perfect place in the technology curve for apple; the tech is all there, but nobody has implemented anything usable.
It's been shown before that Intel chips make up roughly 40 percent of the BOM/retail price (however you want to account it) of a PC. I doubt it's less than say 30 percent for an Apple Mac.
The retail price for a high-end chip is like $30, max. The retail price for a Core i5 can be more than $300. So yes, I think the pricing difference can be significant. Or rather the profit difference for Apple.
Apple could basically sell an ARM-based Macbook Air for $700, and make the same amount of profit per unit - BUT, sell a lot more of them, since they're $700 per unit. Apple could also sell it for $800, and make a lot more in profit per unit, too.
Citation?
Why would an ARM-based Mac do any better than WinRT?
I don't see any explanation in your comment of how any of those aspects would be worse.
You say "Apple wouldn't profit much more from the switch" because of the volume discounts they get from Intel, but you don't cite exactly how much of a discount they get, and you still concede that Apple's own ARM chips might have a lower cost.
You say "battery life would go up a bit," and seem to imply that it could be up to 20%, which in my opinion is massive.
And you don't address size.
How then are any of those aspects worse? Even under your own seemingly pessimistic estimates, cost and battery life would improve.
All their old apps now run probably 2 to 10 times slower, until new native binaries arrived. Compare that with the PPC->Intel transition, when old binary apps stayed about the same or maybe got a little faster.
Also, emulating Intel binary apps with the CPU pegged for twice as long nullifies any energy savings, so the battery life in practice gets worse. Even if it is 20% for native binary apps, consumers are going to see "new computer, worse battery life, Og smash!" during the transition.
You're not going to see a 20% gain in battery life for native binaries, though. The only way you'd see that is if the ARM CPU used no energy at all. Extraordinary claims, evidence, and all that.
Is there really any reason to think that an Intel and ARM chip of comparable performance will have significantly different package sizes? Intel has always been the leader in process technology, so it would surprise me if the ARM die were any smaller.
I don't think boot camp/Windows virtualization is relevant. I don't know anyone who uses these features on their Macs. I'm sure there are people for whom this is a make-or-break capability, but it may be that Apple thinks that at this point, they are expendable.
Processor speed means a lot less than it used to. Even processors from half a decade ago are more than fast enough for what most people do with a computer.
Apple chips are in terms of tech already competitive with anything Intel has to offer [1], though of course currently optimised for mobile. Introduce a dedicated chip for macOS without the heat and power restrictions and Apple won't be chained to intel any more. It will save the extra $50-500 they pay intel for every chip. On top of that, the battery will be smaller/cheaper; it will require fewer external chips as the SoC will incorporate this functionality (also cheaper, more control); the retina graphics will be driven by a chip that is adequately powered and optimised (intels graphics chips are extremely slow): all of the sudden the whole package is extremely compelling.
All you lose is windows compatibility. A small downside to multiple big upsides.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi...
Thanks but no thanks.
If Apple was able to get the performance of their chips up to the level of Intel chips, would they be able to save hundreds per machine? Intel has some very large economies of scale.
If Apple wanted to save hundreds per machine they could do that right now. Intel's marketing campaigns that Apple doesn't take part of (like the 'Intel Inside' stickers) come with large rebates. Apple could use that and not have to go through the huge pain of another architecture switch.
Intel chips blew the doors off PPC by the time Apple got around to the PPC -> Intel transition. That (and good emulation software) allowed a relatively pain-free transition for most consumers: PPC apps didn't feel any slower when run on a new Intel-based Mac. That made it fairly easy to accumulate a critical mass of users with Intel systems, yet it still took ages for native apps to become available from the likes of Adobe and others.
Fast forward to today.
ARM chips are, at best, a little slower than the Intel chips they would replace. On top of that, the x86 ISA has a reputation for being hard to emulate well. So put yourself in the shoes of the consumer: are you going to upgrade to the new ARMBook Air, if it runs all your old apps at 1/2 or 1/4 the speed (and I'm being super optimistic here) they ran on your old MacBook Air? No! You're not! You're going to stick it out until the second generation of ARMBook comes out.
That means no critical mass of people who own ARM-based Macs and are willing and able to pay for native ARM software. That means vendors will. not. follow. This doesn't even take into account that Apple have burned their bridge with Adobe (a major vendor of 3rd party software for Mac).
Last point: I think you're wrong about games. There are tons of games for Mac on Steam. Would vendors go to the trouble of making a Mac port if there was no money in it?
Just like they lost compatibility when they switched from PPC to Intel?
I think that's one thing that a lot of commenters in this thread are ignoring: Apple has done this before. They've switched from PPC to Intel when IBM wasn't committing to making the power efficiency gains that they were looking for, and they'll switch from Intel to their own homegrown ARM chips for essentially the same reason.
I'm not sure they could do such a transition again on the desktop. Other commenters ideas of making an 'iPad pro' and coming at it from that direction seems like a much better idea if you think any of this should be done.
Don't forget that Apple is up against Intel. They're called Fabzilla for a reason. Apple has a done an amazing job with their phones and tablets but when it comes to raw performance on the desktop I don't think they'd be able to keep up when Intel decided to start playing hardball.
Either way, this is nothing compared to the mess of delays the G4 and G5 went though, especially on mobile. Compared to what Apple has seen before this is a tiny detour.
And of course since Intel is the market leader, Apple is (at worst) in the same boat as everyone else. With the G4/5 they were falling further and further behind each year.
A switch like this would kill Thunderbolt and many USB drivers.
Besides, we already saw what happens when Microsoft tried to switch to ARM through WinRT. That was an absolute disaster. Why would Apple try to do the same?
>This document describes the Accelerate Framework, which contains C APIs for vector and matrix math, digital signal processing, large number handling, and image processing.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accele...
No fan noise, no fan volume, no openings for dust to get inside the system. I personally can't wait until laptop fans go away.
When you start getting into "laptop level" power (ie comparable to pentium), even at the ARM level, you start seeing fans. For example, the first generation nvidia shield.
I wish people would stop saying this. On the inside, x86 CPUs are basically RISC. There is a translation layer from the publicly facing instruction layer to the internal representation. The transistor and power budget for this translation layer is absolutely trivial.
Intel has an enormous amount of expertise in the actual manufacturing and design layers, as evidenced by the rate of improvement in their Atom CPUs (striking range of ARM, actually), integrated GPUs, and quasi-GPU compute cards. They are not in danger of "losing" in the long term in a performance or performance / watt race. The risk is they get disrupted due to all CPUs turning into a commodity in roughly the same way that RAM is a commodity.
If one doesn't even know what uops are, and doesn't have a mental estimate of what percentage of i7 silicon is devoted to the instruction decoder, one doesn't get to write articles comparing Intel to ARM chips.
Edit: Going back to the article I note the author is Jean-Louis Gassee, so this is just bizarre. He is kind of just talking out his ass and I would hope he'd know better than that, because whereas making stuff up is a survival skill in exec-land, being blatantly and demonstrably wrong about said make-ups is not.
Yeah, not sure why anyone is interested in what Gassee has to say. He used to be "head of Apple's advanced product development", but was forced out for failing to deliver.[1]
Also, he should get the small details right. He claims in the article
The x86 nickname used to designate Wintel chips
originates from the 8086 processor introduced
in 1978 – itself a backward-compatible extension
of the 8088…)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8086
In addition he has been an excellent writer about technology businesses for years now.
EDIT: And there are things like instruction gates that seriously are cruft that gums up how the memory system works, and some would argue that the x86 memory ordering constraints fall under this as well. On the other hand you should listen to Linus rant about how REP MOVS is the best thing since sliced bread that every other architecture is missing out on.
There are some interesting questions related to whatever convergence of tablets and laptops ends up happening. But it's not clear to me that especially favors ARM. And, it's also a hybrid sort of device that seems so obvious yet Apple finally got tablets to take off by taking a different path. So I'm skeptical about time frames at a minimum.
> Because of this excess baggage, an x86 chip needs more
> transistors than its ARM-based equivalent, and thus it
> consumes more power and must dissipate more heat.
In the ancient days, CPUs ran synchronously (or close to it) with main memory. Hasn't been that way for decades. CPU performance has ramped up so much more quickly than that of main memory that it's ridiculous.
And this is where most of your transistors are spent these days - finding ways to allow the CPU to do some useful work while it sits around waiting for main memory. Look at a modern i5 CPU die:
https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+core+i5
Things to note: - Tons of L1/L2/L3 cache so we can keep things in fast memory. The transistors dedicated to cache dwarf those allocated to the actual processing cores, let alone the parts of those processing cores dedicated to those crufty ol' x86 instructions - Lots of transistors dedicated to branch prediction and speculative execution so we can execute instructions before we've even waited around for the data those instructions depend upon to arrive from slow-ass main memory
Sure, mobile ARM chips are tiny and efficient! They run at 1-2GHZ while paired with fast RAM that's not that much slower than their CPUs. They don't need to devote gobs and gobs of transistors to speculative execution and branch prediction and cache.
But all that changes if you want to scale an ARM chip up to perform like a "desktop-class" Intel chip. You want to add cores and execution units? If you want to keep them fed with data and instructions you're going to need all that extra transistor-heavy baggage and guess what -- now you're just barely more efficient than Intel, and you can't match Intel's superior process technology that's been at least a transistor shrink or two ahead of the competition since the dawn of the semiconductor industry.
Eventually, yes, the ARM chip makers will solve this. RAM will get faster and processes will be enshrinkified. Just understand that transistor size and pokey RAM are the bottlenecks, not that nasty old x86 instruction set.
http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/cpu/intel_core_i5_760_b...
Notice the size of the L3. Now look at a core- each core is probably 50% L2 by area, and the L1 + branch predictor/prefetcher probably occupies another 25%.
That link didn't seem quite right - maybe you meant something like this?:
The "excess baggage" argument being made in the article dates back decades, to the earliest RISC vs. CISC days, and within the Mac ecosystem that argument ended when Apple ditched PowerPC and went to x86.
Back in the 1990s you could make a pretty good argument for RISC architectures vs CISC ones like x86, because the circuitry for all those "extra" instructions took up a lot of die space. But new processes have meant that the percentage of die space that must be devoted to the x86 instruction set gets smaller and smaller with each generation. In other words, if x86 was going to lose out to RISC architectures, it would have happened in the 1990s. Their advantage has only eroded since then.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi...
Meanwhile, the latency has been getting worse. The refresh rates increasing abates it slightly but all the indirection to make high bandwidth ram, plus the commoditization of ram to make high capacity rather than "fast" (transitor only memory like cache shows what is possible for orders of magnitude more complexity and cost).
Adding more cores doesn't impact that latency at all, it just demands more bandwidth. If anything, the diminishing returns of what Intel has done - dedicating a lot of per-core die to prediction just to throw away computations because the per core power is too high - make less sense than just putting a lot more dumb cores on the die.
But then you get GPUs. Shitty latency, huge bandwidth, huge flops, terrible context switching, etc.
It is worth mentioning that both sides of the equation are doing the same thing, though. RAM makers are dedicating a majority of the silicon on ram modules to controllers to accelerate lookup, rather than actual capactive storage.
For the average user, you don't need that hugely complex Haswell logic. Tablet class performance for the web, office suites, and even programming sans compiling are all perfectly competent. If we wrote better software that utilized all the available cores sooner, we would have gone down the route of 16 - 32 core main CPUs instead of extreme precomputation. That has a lot more potential performance, but it requires the software to use it.
ARM is kind of uniquely poised to do that as well. Most of its ecosystem is fresh, it went through an extremely fast multicore expansion, and its architecture lends itself to more cores instead of trying the "dedicate everything to offsetting slow memory" problem. If software architects started writing their programs to be core-variable as possible, ARM might be the first realistic platform to break consumer 16 core computing, because the Windows world is frozen in time.
> Memory isn't just slow because they went for capacity
> not performance (except vacuously), it's slow because
> of the laws of physics.
> There's a reason why the iPhone and iPad only have two
> cores - it's not worth their while adding more but does
> add lots of cost and complexity.
> Problem here is that you are mixing memory latency and memory bandwidth together.
> If software architects started writing their programs to be core-variable as possible,
The reality is that a great many computing problems simply don't lend themselves to parallelization. Some things are embarrassingly parallel (like a lot of graphics work) but a lot of algorithms simply aren't able to be implemented in a very parallel way since each "step" depends heavily on things you need to calculate in the previous "step." (Example: simulations, games, etc)
Things will improve a little bit, as our languages support easier parallel/concurrent code and our compilers get better at things like auto-parallelization, but this won't magically make stubbornly sequential algorithms into things that scale to two cores, much less "a lot more dumb cores."
> just putting a lot more dumb cores on the die
The "lots of dumb cores" thing has been tried before. Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine and Intel's Larrabee and things like that. Seriously, don't you think that hardware designers have thought of this before? They have. There's a reason why Intel doesn't just throw 100 Pentium cores onto a single i7-sized die and dominate the entire world.
Regarding battery life: The latest MacBooks get 9-12 hours of battery life. I haven't experienced battery anxiety on a Mac in a long time. In contrast, my iPhone is dead by the end of the day and watching it creep below 50% makes me start thinking about the nearest Lightning adapter (yes, I understand the Mac has a much larger battery and cell radios are power hungry).
Put another way, max power consumption on an iPad Air is ~11W[1]. The max power draw on a Haswell MacBook Air is 15-25W (~50% improvement in battery life from 2012 to 2013, which had 21-34W max draw)[2][3]. Given that Macs have more space available for batteries due to larger screens and the need for keyboard and trackpad, I don't see power consumption argument holding water.
[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/3
[2]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-20...
[3]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013...
Fortunately, because I really like OS X, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that Apple is this stupid.
To create a low power system, ALL components need to be low power, and it is easier to start from a system built to be low power and scale up capabilities rather than go the other way around.
For instance, I have a Windows-based laptop which is a great machine, but if I have a web browser open, any web browser, the fan spins, it gets hot, and battery life is less than 1.5 hours.
Is it the fault of Windows, the browser vendors, the web platform, adware, crapware, who knows what? It doesn't matter, but controlling power consumption on a legacy platform is a game of whac-a-mole that doesn't end.
Because Windows users expect to plug in devices that draw power from USB, a Windows tablet has to have a huge power transistor to regulate voltage, a power supply system scaled up so it can supply enough power through the USB port to charge an Android tablet, at this point you might add the fan and then you are doomed.
I saw an interesting interview once with an ARM exec who leveled and said they don't really have a big power advantage over Intel, despite what people commonly think. I didn't manage to find the article with Google though.
The unwalled garden can still be made low power. Android has set an example of tackling that problem with the battery tracker, which profiles which application is chewing up battery.
For power over USB, what do you mean? My Android cell phone can power keyboards, flash drives, and the like with an OTG cable. It certainly has no fan.
Consider this analogy: Would you buy an "open-source" deadbolt for your house? Great feature for aspiring locksmiths! But very likely not such a great feature for 99.9% of home owners.
Google doesn't restrict access to applications or content on my Nexus 5, so how is it a walled garden?
It'd make some business sense for them to instead position iOS so it can take over more and more traditional Mac duties. The IBM push could be an example of that. Investing in iOS gives Apple the tight control and the 30% cut they're used to from that space, and it avoids the Windows-RT-ish heartbreak of "why is this ARM OS like my Intel OS but without all my apps?" (If there were Mac-on-ARM, I'd expect it to be Mac App Store only.)
Anyway, the A7 is already a beast (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchi... does various measurements, http://cryptomaths.com/2014/04/29/benchmarking-symmetric-cry... is an interesting case study), and there are still future process nodes and microarchitecture changes that will let them make better chips. I don't know if an ARM MacBook Air is specifically where this goes, but they're certainly making ARM capable of more serious stuff.
The problem should be much smaller on OS X than on Windows. Apple has a culture of breaking things regularly, instead of worshipping backwards compatabillity.
The result is that most Mac apps are kept up to date by the developer. Recompiling for an arm-based OS X shouldn't be an issue.
That's maybe true for indie developers. It's not generally true for things like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, MATLAB, Mathematica, Skype, and dozens of other major titles that would likely be complete dealbreakers for a pretty significant portion of their userbase.
From personal experience, I can tell you that this does not happen with big software. Apple released the first Intel Macs in early 2006. The next year Intuit released Quicken 2007 which was PPC only.
The first version of Quicken to be x86 for Mac was Quicken Essentials 2010. First of all that's four years after the transition. Second, Quicken Essentials was crippled. Here's a quote from Wikipedia:
> Some of the features of Quicken are not present in Quicken Essentials for Mac, such as the ability to track investment buys and sells or to pay bills online from the application.
So unless you wanted something ultra-basic you were screwed. Intuit's answer was that they'd give you a free copy of Quick '08 for Windows. All you needed to do was buy Parallels (etc.) and Windows.
This was a big problem because OS X finally dropped PPC emulation support, called Rosetta, in 2011 with the release of Lion. So after 5 years Intuit, a VERY big company, was unwilling to update their software or provide a real equivalent for their Mac users.
If you look at the announcements for each version of Adobe Creative Suite for Mac you'll find references to starting to use features of the OS that Apple introduced years ago.
On a related note, I think it's important to differentiate between utility software that's assumed to be temporary, and one-off pieces of software that are intended to live forever. I wish there was an easier way to write software in such a way that it can easily be guaranteed to run in the future, no matter the architecture. (Open source is not a guarantee. Ever try compiling the source to a AAA game?)
Opening the source would help quite a lot with that.
Comparing a Dell XPS to a Macbook Pro Retina with the very similar stats (CPU/RAM/HD), the Mac has a few better specs, leaves us with a price difference of $100 in Dell's favor but I can promise you that the MBPr will resale for much higher than the XPS in 1-2 years time. I had friends in college that always would joke that I paid a small fortune for my MBP ($1500) however these were the same people who would buy a $500 laptop every year or so because their bargain bin laptops just didn't last long before they started having hardware issues or massive slowdowns. My MBP ran quite smoothly for 2.5 years before I needed a faster CPU (I'm a developer) and I sold my machine for $900 which resulted in an operating cost of $240/yr for the period I owned it.
I bought a mid level Vostro a while back and it is absolute piece of shit.
Touch pad detects my palm from across the room but is inaccurate when I actually touch it, screen is mediocre and lets dust in constantly, keyboard is mushy with no positive click.
The spec looked good and Vostro's used to be ok, the Vostro 1700 I had prior was a fine machine.
It's so bad I've found myself using my ancient Thinkpad (Celeron M) when I have to do a lot of typing.
As for massive slowdowns, I'm having a problem at the moment in that everyone I know with an old 4GB ram mac is having a massively slow system once they upgrade to Mavericks. On a clean boot, these machines are already using 3.5-4GB, which makes no sense.
Please show me a windows laptop that is still worth even half it's value after 2 years.
About two months ago I was looking for a Thinkpad w700ds, and while admittedly an unusual laptop, I found two items on ebay going for more than they originally cost. As for a 5yo laptop costing $1500 after resale, the laptop I currently use is a Thinkpad x200, a 6yo laptop that I bought new for $1300 and I see now on ebay for an opening bid of $200. $1300/6 = $217/year (less if you count the $200 ebay sale), which is cheaper than any of the options you're proferring. Where is this magical Apple-only value you're talking about with laptops, then? I find that Apple fans are very skilled at convincing themselves that everything else sucks, which is fine (each to their own) until they start proselytising. Yes, Apple machines do hold their value well, but from your own numbers breakdown, my Thinkpad more than holds its own if you want to talk turkey.
In any case, the point I was making wasn't about the resale value itself, it was that most folks don't actually resell their computers. Most people run their computers into the ground, then buy another one.
Whether Apple would allow it is a different question.
I wouldn't predict a long maintenance life for it. Surface2 and the Nokia 2520 is about all the hardware left running it?
Unless Microsoft also drops Intel, I don't see this happening.
Of course, if Apple is also making their own x86 compatible chips, that's a different story. I don't need an Intel chip specifically, I just need something that runs Windows / x86 perfectly....
Another obstacle is Thunderbolt. This DisplayPort + External PCI-Express Cable is totally in control by Intel. AMD's version is based on USB 3, which is an ugly hack that Apple will unlikely use.
The performance gap between Haswell and A7 is huge. Watts to Watts, at Notebook / Desktop power range Intel wins hands down. Although the gap is shrinking with each Ax SoC.
Then there is the part about Intel Atom losing on performance. Which is wrong. Intel Atom SoC performs really well. It didn't get much wins simply because of its ecosystem and prices.
The Mobile SoC market are operating at thin margin comparatively speaking. Even if Intel are offering Atom at the same price, why would any OEM wants to be bound by Intel & x86 again? So Intel decide to offer those SoC at a lost and what happened? On the Western world it is dominated by Qualcomm where it offer better solution or cheaper TC with its integrated Modem. In Eastern World or China it is hit by "8 Core" marketing team from MediaTek. Everyone thoughts more Core = better.
I dont see how Intel is going win this Mobile battle. Apple will pretty much drive Intel to where they want, which is to Fab SoC for them.
It looks like Chromebooks are a very popular format and I think an ARM based 'AirBook' could compete in that space.
Napkin Math
MacBook Air current generation (mid-2013) retail price: $999 ($1099 for 13″ model with same CPU).
Intel Core i5-4250U, Tray: $315, http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/ (sure Apple will be getting large discounts on this, but it can't be that large, since $INTC has ~60% gross margin overall)
Apple A7, Tray: $20 (estimated)
Intel Atom E3827, Tray: $41
Tray = 1000 pcs;
The Core i5 has a 15W TDP; 1.3 Ghz clock (turbo to 2.6Ghz); 2 cores, 4 threads. Sunspider 250ms.
The Apple A7 has a 2W TDP; 1.3Ghz clock; 2 cores, 2 threads. Sunspider 397 ms.
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4250U-vs-Apple-A7
It’s not looking all that different! Esp. when you take into account that the A8 will be twice as fast (think Tegra K1) – i.e – a Sunspider score of 200ms maybe?
I like the ARM architecture a lot. It's simple and easy to write software for, all the way from embedded controller stuff to "real" operating systems. But they're not all that great at doing massive computation. We were going to use one in the video path of a popular gaming system for a while, and it turned out to be inadequate by at least an order of magnitude (probably a factor of 100, but comparing CPU cycles to GPU cycles is pretty unfair).
Intel is executing really well, and it'll probably take an alien invasion to dethrone them.
There is nothing here that is backed-up news whatsoever.
Beyond that, all apps on the OS X app store will have to be recompiled and resubmitted. None of the binaries installed on current OS X machines will still work, unless Apple includes an x86 emulator like they did for the transition from PowerPC.
This will also open up the possibility of running iOS apps natively on OS X, but I doubt Apple will pursue that at all (for UX reasons).
I can imagine this might be a huge job for some of the more heavyweight production programs for Mac , as well as AAA games.
It would basically spell doom for Parallels and other virtualization software which give Mac switchers an escape hatch back to any Windows programs they might use.
I once managed to create a cross-build system "wrong way". (OBS made this error both possible and easy.) I tried to build some pretty heavy x86 software (QtWebKit) and ended up creating a config that used a cluster of panda boards to run qemus in x86 emulation mode.
To my chagrin, I didn't realise the error until I was wondering, after ~5h, why my build was still not finished.
> Beyond that, all apps on the OS X app store will have to be recompiled and resubmitted.
How far does Apple want to go? The rabbit hole is pretty much infinite. Do they want to make their own plastics and paints and metals? Do they want to mine the materials for all of the above? Do they want to make the mining machines for their mines? Etc, etc, etc.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I wish Flash on Mac would die die die. Youtube has the ability of showing me non-flash video on a Mac. And yet they often won't. The exact same video that won't play on a Mac will play just fine on an iPad. Evil bastards! With Flash dead, Google wouldn't be able to demand I use it.
In practice, that would make a huge difference in terms of Flash's market share.
Their work on the Ax series has probably taught them quite a bit that could be ported over to x86-land. Also, Apple could leave out x86 cruft they don't use: legacy addressing modes, PAE, etc. And of course, they could design the CPU specifically for their products instead of searching for the closest match sold by existing vendors (or cajoling Intel to tweak their designs).
Apple already has strong relationships with fab companies. They have the talent and teams to design such a CPU. One wonders if they're already working on such a thing. Even if it never shipped, it could be used to negotiate lower prices from Intel.
If Apple wanted to go full-iOS and lock out everything that isn't Apple-approved, then this would be a good idea. If they wanted to keep Bootcamp, virtualization, or an unregulated third-party application development environment, designing chips without the standard features of Intel chips wouldn't be a great idea.
There's the small matter of getting an x86 license. Which would mean buying Intel or AMD, since it's vanishingly unlikely that Intel will be handing them out any time soon.
Apple could afford to buy Intel, but antitrust considerations would probably prevent that from happening.
Apple could buy AMD, but the Intel/AMD x86 cross license probably terminates in a "change of control" situation. Which might mean a restart of the Intel/AMD lawsuits of years gone by.
i can see a laptop-sized ARM-based product from apple, but it won't replace any of the macs, it'll be something completely new - let's call it a macpad.
Why should we listen to someone who doesn't know what quotes do in search queries?
It'll probably be even easier the next time since apple has done it once already and knows how to provide the proper dev tools.
Pyschologically it still matters though, as you said, they did it twice and the first was surely a harder task.
In the beginning there was the motherboard and a CPU. Then, before homogenic PC era, we had dedicated chips that took care of certain operations. The SID chip in C-64. The blitter chip in Amiga. (Can't remember the name, I'm sorry.) Even the x87 math coprocessor in the 386/486 age!
With advent of PC and the megahertz wars, dedicated peripheral chips became less common - except in SoC environment. Where the x86 world went with raw processing power, embedded world had to find ways to fit specialised chips on the board.
My experience is mostly centred around crypto accelerators, but I know from very painful experience that all Maemo devices had on-board DSP units to handle some sound decoding, and pretty much all video processing. So the pendulum swings: CPU for everything, then peripheral devices for specific high-intensity jobs. Some of the most commonly used get integrated into CPU's, making entire classes of chips irrelevant ... until the next CPU-intensive thing comes up, and the main processor is again too slow.
Apple is banking on their ability to both predict and dictate the direction of near-future computing needs. I expect the A7/A10 boards to come up with all kinds of integrated support chips to handle the heavier loads.
As long as their predictions are correct, all is well. Any bets on what's the next CPU burner that will require a dedicated ASIC to preserve even the semblance of battery longevity?
also, the self noted digressions in the article arent even funny, feels like someone with an english degree and subscription to "i can spell x86" magazine wrote this article