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A comment on Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs. Parent comment

Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by old-gregg on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:52PM (#23606473)
I'll bite.

  > Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is
  > roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from 
  > any other manufacturer.
We haven't been able to compare them. Micro-benchmarks do not count because mobile versions of Apple chips haven't been designed for desktop requirements. People love comparing CPU cores with micro-benchmarks, but the hardest thing for a modern desktop/server chip is to feed data to many cores while maintaining cache coherence.

  > So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an 
  > extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster.
Before agreeing with your estimates, I want to play with a true 8-core Apple CPU with a large multi-level cache first. Building the Linux kernel with -J16 will be a fun exercise. Look, AMD is not stupid, and they're on the same node Apple will be using, and they're not 30% faster than even a 5y.o. Skylake.

  > 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.
I wonder how their conversations with TSMC go. With Intel, at least they had AMD to use as a bargaining chip. With TSMC there's no alternative.

  > 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.
That's the big one. The world's software is built for and runs in data centers, not laptops. Our machines are increasingly becoming nothing but thin clients, remote displays that happen to run Javascript. CPUs do not matter. And I suspect that's the real reason they're switching.

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".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by Stratoscope on Monday June 22, 2020 @06:53PM (#23607885)
> P.S. I love how "old-tech" HN is, but for the love of god, give us a decent way to "reply with quote".

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.*
That will render nicely on all devices regardless of the length of the paragraph. If you quote multiple paragraphs, add a blank line between each paragraph so they don't run together.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by imtringued on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:14AM (#23612427)
Wasn't Linus' email implying that if you were to run something like docker natively on ARM then the images you build would be ARM specific. You are not going to spend time and effort on running the build on a x86 machine to then deploy on another x86 machine. You will just deploy your docker images straight to an ARM server.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by pier25 on Monday June 22, 2020 @05:47PM (#23607210)
> Look, AMD is not stupid, and they're on the same node Apple will be using

Could you elaborate? What do you mean with the "same node"?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by jiggawatts on Monday June 22, 2020 @06:18PM (#23607550)
They're both making 7nm chips at the same TSMC fabs. Essentially, Apple will not have a "process advantage" over AMD. They may release their desktops chips on the latest 5nm TSMC process to get that "wow" product and make a good initial impression, but AMD will be right behind them with the equivalent desktop x64 chips. The current rumor is that late 2021 or early 2022 is when AMD will have a "Zen 4" on 5nm, which will almost certainly blow the pants off everything else on the market at the time.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by pier25 on Monday June 22, 2020 @07:48PM (#23608318)
> The current rumor is that late 2021 or early 2022 is when AMD will have a "Zen 4" on 5nm, which will almost certainly blow the pants off everything else on the market at the time.

You mean in terms of max performance, perf per watt, or... ?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by monocasa on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:11PM (#23608492)
Yes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by thejynxed on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @05:01AM (#23625754)
All of the above, and it will cost less to boot, and certainly will cost at minimum half of Apple's ridiculous markup.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for ... by auggierose on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @05:33AM (#23611675)
I am pretty sure they had those TSMC conversations BEFORE the announcement.
[ Parent | on HN ]