Microsoft started down that path last year with Windows 10 on ARM, and Intel had some legal issues with that - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel... It will be interesting to see how Apple handles this.
The switch to Intel started six months [correction: seven months] from the announcement, and took seven months to complete.
June 5th, 2005: Intel switch announced at WWDC
January 10th, 2006: First Intel Macs (MacBook Pro and iMac) released
August 7th, 2006: Mac Pro and Intel Xserve released, last PowerPC Macs discontinued
https://everymac.com/systems/by_timeline/index-macs-by-timel...
Second, while Apple's mobile processors are currently the best in ARM world, for "pro" desktop computers Apple needs desktop-grade processor. Making something comparable to i7 isn't such an easy and cheap job.
Besides, there's no Carbon to Cocoa or CodeWarrior to Xcode port, so aside from a very small percentage of optimized assembly code, it shouldn't be nearly as hard.
Good point, I guess Apple never though of that.
I though one of the major reasons for the switch to Intel was the power consumption and performance on laptops.
Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Cavium have created very powerful ARM chips for non-mobile application. Apple definitely has the chip architects, the money, and the experience to do such a thing.
(Amd, Intel, and now Apple)
By the way, don't forget Broadcom, Marvell, Cavium, IBM etc. as they are doing big bucks with CPU's and SoC's as well.
I'm specifically worried about the performance workstation/gaming cpu market, which Broadcom Marvell, Cavium, and IBM are not major players in. It's currently AMD and Intel. Apple would need to sell a lot of macs with the new CPUs to make the R&D cost worth it and the new CPUs would have to be very fast or they won't sell macs.
But even if flat-out performance isn’t as good, what about if it proves cheap and easy to scale to more cores? Like, what if you get twice as many cores as the Intel equivalent has threads, albeit at 2/3 the speed (maybe worse or better for some workloads) but no hyperthreading-style contention? This wouldn’t be useless.
And GPU-accelerated functionality will be mostly unaffected.
How about FX!32 or it’s latest AArch64 cousin seen on Windows 10?
Of the above, qemu can target x86 and run on anything, Virtual PC ran originally on PowerPC, and FX!32 ran on the Alpha
Intel’s position amounts to cage rattling and vague insinuations that efficient execution of x86 code is impossible without hardware support. That’s nice, and their ham-fisted approach already hurt customer choice in the past (Transmeta and nVidia Denver, before the later implemented the Arm ISA) but the Windows on Arm solution is completely software and not coupled to any specific Arm chip implementation.
It usually takes 4-5 years to design a chip, and if Apple planned on releasing the Mac CPU in 2020, well...
Apple would not be making this switch if they didn't think they could improve performance.
Knowing Apple had Intel Macs running in the background for years before they announced the jump to x86, I wouldn't be surprised if they already have the chips and know how well it performs.
And I also wouldn't mind if they did another demo like they used to: https://youtu.be/oxwmF0OJ0vg?t=24m45s
The Intel chip you mention isn't in any Apple machine at all. (Except maybe the iMac Pro? Is it even in that?) So you be real. I don't think you've actually looked at the benchmarks. You should do so. I think you'll be shocked at just how much overlap there is, just like I was.
What benchmarks? Geekbench? That's the only one I've ever seen where the fight is close, and Geekbench (like everything that boils performance down to one number) is nearly completely useless.
If you see a two-watt phone CPU beating a 45-watt actively-cooled laptop CPU, you can either conclude that the phone is alien technology decades ahead of anything else on the market or that the benchmark is broken. Which is more likely?
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
Geekbench may not be the best tool for determining the power of a processor, but at the least it gives you a general idea of power across devices in a consistent set of tests, which can be extrapolated.
That post is pretty outdated. It's about old hardware and an old version of Geekbench. But people still use Geekbench 3 and old x86 hardware, so it's not totally irrelevant.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "But Geekbench..." is not extraordinary evidence. Give me a board where I can do an Apple to apples comparison, booting both under the same revision of the same OS, and running industry standard benchmarks (read: plural), and then we can come to that conclusion.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. We have some evidence; you're welcome to believe it or not, but unless you supply alternative evidence you're not really making an argument. You're just saying "it might not be true," which is something anyone can say at any time about anything.
It should be irrelevant in Apple's case anyway since they run their own OS. If their OS is faster for a certain task than some other OS then that's part of what you would define as "faster" for a user of the device.
Right? Am I missing something?
We've been asking why Apple doesn't already do it.
The same architecture can generally scale to 10x over a few process generations.
Possibly a patent issue also
Clock speeds alone can probably increase by 30%. Caches and internal datapaths can double or more. Then you can start to add in more execution units or more expensive branch-prediciton or even new more power-hungry instructions.
A 4 Watt Intel Pentium 4410Y Kaby Lake for mobile devices gets about 1800 on Geekbench, while a 115 Watt Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake for desktops gets 5600.
I'm just going to say it: the Apple laptop CPU is going to get Geekbench score... above 9000!
And, yes, I do have a CPU design background.
Once you understand this, then you can understand how CPU designers work to predict future performance. CPU designers use artificial testbenches.
Or even further they could bake a "rosetta" into the chip's microcode and have their CPU natively support the x86 instruction set along with ARM or whatever they come up with.
The greater threat is the ios-ofcation of macOS. We've seen many companies pull their apps from the Mac App store due to the limitations of the sandbox.
Imagine if they're not held back by the battery at all, or even just have to match the power consumption of the power-hungry x86 chips.
If we had a MBP with 64 wimpy a53 cores it would still only have 50% of the performance of a Intel i7 8700k or AMD Ryzen 1800X on paper. Of course that is faster than most notebooks but if you truly care about CPU performance then you usually wouldn't use a notebook in the first place.
Arguably, the A11 Bionic is already faster than mainstream desktop CPUs.
"The iPhone 8 even edged out the score from the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with a 7th-generation Core i5 processor. That notebook notched 9,213. Is Geekbench 4 really comparable from phone to desktop? According to the founder of Geekbench, John Poole, 'the short is answer is yes that the scores are comparable across platforms, so if an iPhone 8 scores higher than an i5, then the iPhone 8 is faster than the i5.'"[1]
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-pho...
But more seriously and less snarky there's a reason they used the 13" macbook pro there specifically and that's because the 15" with the quad-core i7 destroys the A11, 15k vs. 10k. Of course that's with wildly different power & thermal budgets, and I haven't seen much reason to think these geekbench results are at all representative of anything, so grains of salt and all that.
Also if you look at the performance trajectory of A-series in the last five years, 2020 sounds about right for where the crossover will come even between iOS based A-series processors and the fastest of what Intel has to offer, provided they can keep up the pace of performance improvement.
Geekbench is based on the unthrottled peak performance of the CPU. Increasing the TDP headroom eliminates throttling but Geekbench doesn't measure throttling.
You can perhaps increase performance by overclocking but this requires the CPU to be designed for higher frequencies. AMD's Ryzen CPUs usually top out at around 4 GHz. Intel's CPU can be overclocked up to 5 GHz. The maximum clock speed is limited by the slowest component of the CPU. If the slowest operation takes 0.25 nanoseconds to complete this limits your frequency to 4GHz. If Apple had enough foresight to design their chips with this in mind then maybe but in reality they probably optimized the chip entirely for mobile TDPs.
will apple up the battery requirements for their own cpu/gpu, or would they simply drop battery while striving for a thinner laptop?
this from someone who's been buying/using Macs for a long time - I'd love to see some very fast arm competition, but is that what it'd really turn out to be?
Have they really, though? What lines are actually crossing? Intel's mobile CPUs have continued to shed power, so how much of this is actually Apple "catching up" to Intel vs. Intel just optimizing for power at the cost of performance? As in, is there any performance gap that's actually shrinking, or are phone SoCs just getting more power hungry while laptop ones are getting less power hungry?
Because phone SoCs have gotten rather monsterously power hungry compared to years past. They are actually 5w under real world load parts now, with devices just letting them thermal throttle rapidly to achieve higher burst rates. Laptops, by contrast, are ~10w TDP, vastly less than they were a decade ago.
This would probably make a fascinating in-depth analysis, but the singular data point of a 5w SoC being within spitting distance of a 10w SoC is hardly a revolutionary story. It's pretty much what you expect.
From my understanding, which might be wrong, Geekbench only tests what both can do. Comparing a pickup truck and a sports car you need to look at more than just how fast they can do. You can both move furniture, but the sports car will need to do a lot more to be able to what the pickup can.
Yes, Geekbench is a terrible CPU benchmark, but both of them are Turing complete, so there is no functionality difference. And complex instructions are broken into uOps in x86 too.
I'm sorry, we need better evidence.
Apple is probably looking at all these trends and concluding that they don't really need Intel.
These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry."
Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.
As long as iOS developers aren't impacted, I'm not sure what the incentive is for Apple to allow that kind of access.
Apple did just this, twenty years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
Interestingly, they claim to have incorporated some of the technology from MkLinux into OSX, according to this page:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...
Make of that what you will.
- Adobe's plans
- Apple's transition plans
- Really, anything other than the vague statement that Apple will start using their own chips in two years
AutoCAD isn't ultra optimized for Mac anyhow, it will be okay.
This transition may screw up or significantly slow down VMs of Intel-based OSes like Ubuntu.
This may be a terrible outcome for multi-OS users, but it's not guaranteed.
But the Mac thrived for a very long time without x86 compatibility, and it can do the same again, virtualization was always kind of a happy accident for us anyway.
No they won't.
One thing they could run with is ARM-on-ARM virtualization, which is a more direct (heh) parallel to what they do on Intel now, but ARM hypervisors are less mature, and their practical applications, less readily apparent.
VMWare's primary market is vSphere -- and you don't run vSphere on a MacBook.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if even a game like Overwatch got an Arm port.
If my Steam library couldn't come with me, there's no way I'd get an ARM Macbook.
The problem is that you are not just porting from a low TDP atom(by any other name) chip with a intel gfx card but a class of computers that include dual Xeon systems with 2 or more high end ati cards, to something that don't really scale upwards from a macbook air in terms of raw power.
And when you remember how badly outperformed even the highest spec mac pro is compared to their competitors, who is likely still going to be around a decade from now the question is to what extend a maker of high margin niche product targeted at demanding professionals(with corporate procurement budgets) to even consider supporting the mac with anything but a simplified html5 based consumer version that lacks most of the advanced features going forward.
Sure, but if we're deploying to x86 servers running Linux, then running Ubuntu on virtual ARM doesn't seem terribly wise[0] — it won't tickle the right bugs.
[0] For my money, running Ubuntu in general is a poor idea. It's not a great server OS, so it shouldn't be on the server — and if it's not on the server, it shouldn't be on the development systems either. Just run Debian everywhere.
Current Apple best CPUs are already performing very well compared to some Intel CPU. Not the fastest Intel CPU, obviously, but a) Apple Arm implementation is already above all the Arm competitors b) we are talking about an Arm implementation optimized for low energy consumption and other components and functions essential to a high end mobile phone -- and even then it starts to catch up chips that are dissipating more and integrate far less features c) the hypothetical Apple latop/desktop cpu won't be coming today.
From a theoretical pov I see nothing that prevent Apple to achieve what they want. Especially with the kind of money they have, and the kind of team they have to already design chips. Oh btw, the A11 has more transistors than a 4core Skylake. That does not means much, except that we are dealing with the similar kind of projects, and that in that kind of project, the perf and thermal budget you have is not something that suddenly makes the people working on it go: oh my god, but we don't know how to make that, we are only good for mobile phone SoC. I suspect some of Apple employees working on their chips even worked at Intel before...
Another problem with what you say is that the workloads you consider are especially well suited for accelerations, and it is even simpler to compete in this area compared to old school CPU power. You just need bulk compute power, that can come in the form of, at least: vector instructions; GPU; DSP; fixed function acceleration units. Those areas are not especially dominated by Intel.
Some last points are that: top CPU speed are (mostly) not growing anymore. That lets others catch up Intel in the few area that they did not yet -- others also are catching up on the process side.
The result of that equation is that I really don't see why Apple could not manage to create high performance CPU to the point of not needing Intel anymore. Maybe at first they would limit to their laptops, and switch the Mac Pro last, but I'm not even sure of that.
Meanwhile in reality the top end non apple ARM SoCs only have the performance of a single highend intel core.
http://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks/ vs http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/7779910
Otherwise I could as well take the perf of an IBM z14 mainframe and compare it to an existing smartphone SoC, and declare that Arm is doomed because too slow. Note than even increasing the clock alone of those ARM cores would increase the perf greatly -- it might not be possible without modifying them in various degree right now (if you don't target high freq to begin with, you can afford to work less on the length of some critical data path), but given today processes it is very probably not extremely hard to tune the design if needed.
The reason why windows on ARM never caught on was simply that windows was still available for x86. With apple it's different though, because once (Or if) they switch, then the only way to be on OS X is through the use of the new architecture.
There are a variety of features of OS X that are going to keep the design community there for the foreseeable future.
As an example with the PPC->x86 move, they released Rosetta in 2005, stopped pre-installing it in 2009, and only in 2011 did then completely remove the ability to install it. I foresee a similar experience here.
The existence of Rosetta does not prove the transition to be 'complicated'. It just shows the transition was a thing
It's a radical direction, but they are designing the chip by themselves and for themselves, they have deep pockets, and if it worked well it would reduce an important risk.
There are already several chips capable of running multiple instruction sets. Most desktop machines have chips that can run either x86 or x84-64. Some(?) ARM chips have a Thumb mode. So that seems very practical, and obviously there is a bigger "impedance mismatch" when trying to do both x86 and ARM on the same chip, how much worse is it?
If you could do some kind of hardware real-time instruction translation without wasting much silicon and without reducing performance (for x86) that much, it seems like it would take a lot of the pain out of the transition.
And while it might be doable (x64 and ARM on the same chip), I think it might not be a smart decision, since some things will not function correctly or will have to be redone (e.g. speculative execution).
I don't know either architectures on a deep understanding level (x64 or ARM), but I have a feeling that there should be some big architectural changes that would prevent x64 code to run on ARM natively.
I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven?
If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?
Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.
And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space.
You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.
Without the insistence of so many designers on using a Mac, would macOS really have won a foothold in corporate environments? If enough designers and developers switch to Windows, who's to say that macOS won't slowly turn into a hobbyist OS that no IT department wants to support (like Linux, or Macs ~12 years ago)?
Some would argue it's already been dead for a long time. I'm seeing less and less directors and artists using Macs for their workstations when it was close to 100% about 10 years ago.
They just didn't supply a competitive workstation machine for so long that many were forced to move to windows if they wanted power. I don't know a 3D artist anymore who isn't doing all their rendering through multiple Nvidia GPUs in a tower PC.
The iMac Pro has only been out for a few weeks after years of neglect and I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone at that price point.
(Ironically many I know still use a Mac laptop but it's relegated purely to office/email/slack/web tasks that back in the day we'd associate with Windows machines, not the actual creative work)
I don't see recompiling their next release with a different version of Xcode qualifying as "significant work".
That would be Final Cut Pro X, which Apple itself makes. (Also, Motion, Compressor, and honestly, iMovie does a lot of stuff you wouldn't think it could do for a free app.)
I've never encountered anyone using Motion professionally. It's all Nuke and After Effects with Fusion growing.
If they're talking about making MacOS more like iOS I think it might be time to start looking for the exit. A laptop/desktop is not just a portable dumb terminal for accessing siloed cloud services.
Mobile transformed the computer into a portable surveillance and addictive media device aimed at the user rather than a personal computing device built for the user. Those are two separate issues of course -- there is nothing in mobile that mandates that it be designed to commoditize its users -- but the shift to mobile was used to also smuggle in a total inversion of the user/machine relationship.
Apple is kind of a strange company. On one hand they have stuck up for the privacy and security of their users, but on the other hand they were a factor in this inversion of relationship. They weren't the only or even the primary factor, but the locked down nature of their iOS platform helped other actors such as Facebook and Google implement surveillance-capitalist and gamified attention-capitalist user experiences there.
Whether or not I stick with Apple depends on whether or not they keep my computer mine even as they swap out the CPU. I could care less about the architecture as long as it performs well, but I do care about the nature of my relationship with the technology that I use. I care about this for both personal and professional/pragmatic reasons.
I have no doubt they can make it fast and usable enough for the naive consumer living inside the bubble of what relatively inexpensive(consumer grade) app-store apps can do and that microsoft will release something pretending to be MS office for a new ARM macbook line, but photoshop, autocad, mathematica(ok that one is fairly portable), AfterEffects and whatever it is the pro's use for video editing those days are a different ballgame.
We saw microsoft stumble down that path with their successfull port of windows to arm where the OS itself worked but where no major 3rd party business essential app ever got ported to windows for arm, with a lot of IT departments choosing to keep windows 7 around our of fear of what 10 would morph into until MS begun to dial back their ambitions for windows everywhere.
Im guessing that the short run result of Apple going though with OSX on arm is that a lot of the CAD and video editing heavyweights just drop support for whatever OSX morphs into to support running on IOS hardware.