Apple Considering Switch From Intel Chips in Future Macs

[unobtainium]

I think the key word here is "future" - a lot can happen in 5 years. It was only about 6 years ago that Apple was still using PPC. I think Apple AND all of its competitors are likely exploring ARM-based PCs right now. Well, we know Microsoft are!

[seamer]

Originally Posted by faroZ06

What custom chips were they using?

----------



I don't really give a @#$%. I'm sticking with my Mac Pro anyway, and it has an Intel CPU. I couldn't care less if desktop CPUs stagnated forever.

The PowerPC ones, before adopting Darwin as the UI. Those were custom from their vendor. Slower, less power, but more results per cycle than Intel's chips. The dropped PowerPC to convince developers that developing for both OS platforms is easier than developing for Intel -and- PowerPC. Of which, very few did.

But if I'm remembering history out of its correct timeline, please feel free to correct me.

[mariusaz]

And take note Apple, this is where I jump ship.

[eltaurus]

Good Job ... Count me out ... Lose market share ,,, Apple stupid policies don't suprise me at all now ..

there are many professional's Photo/video/3d who need powerful CPU's not mobile devices ... Anyway its your choice..

Because of your tight control our IOS devices being a long time customer of iphone .. after 4s i am going to switch to galaxy S3 ... sd card + no restriction how i manage my Media ..

[kis]

Originally Posted by Small White Car

Isn't Microsoft currently selling a Windows tablet that comes as either ARM or 486?

yes, and they're failing massively. RT is a piece of crap that won't run any decent software. I'm sure Apple thinks that's a great idea now.

----------

Originally Posted by unobtainium

Well, we know Microsoft are!

yeah, and look how well they're doing! The Win 8 RT tablets don't sell. Microsoft is using ARM-support so its manufacturers can make el-cheapo tablets until Intel has caught up and is able to produce hardware in that size, with that battery life. In a year from now, Microsoft will stop making ARM-based products and 2 years from now they'll drop RT.

[subsonix]

Originally Posted by eltaurus

there are many professional's Photo/video/3d who need powerful CPU's not mobile devices ... Anyway its your choice..

What makes you think that it would not be powerful? In the past when Apple have changed CPUs it's been out of necessity, because some alternative came along that was better. In this case intel is leading, at least in low to mid part of the market so the only reason for them to consider a switch is if they have come up with something that is significantly better, something that sets them apart by a large margin.

[namethisfile]

i am not totally against this idea. isn't ARM a RISC cpu? and aresn't RISC cpu's better? i swear tha my g4 powerpc powerbook from 10 yrs ago crashed less than the 3 intel macs i've owned since. and this powerbook still runs today. albeit, the battery no longer holds a charge. and when it did, it did run out after an hour or less of heavy use. those g4 chips weren't as power-efficient as the new intel chips. but, i swear they (g4 powerbooks) seemed more stable.

[TsMkLg068426]

Why is Apple jumping the shark? This is like the same thing they did with new iMacs by removing the optical drive. NO SENSE! Does Apple think that it would be so easy to just go ahead and move into new technology while old technology has nto died yet?

[holmesf]

Originally Posted by namethisfile

i am not totally against this idea. isn't ARM a RISC cpu? and aresn't RISC cpu's better? i swear tha my g4 powerpc powerbook from 10 yrs ago crashed less than the 3 intel macs i've owned since. and this powerbook still runs today. albeit, the battery no longer holds a charge. and when it did, it did run out after an hour or less of heavy use. those g4 chips weren't as power-efficient as the new intel chips. but, i swear they (g4 powerbooks) seemed more stable.

Yes, ARM is RISC-y. But so is Intel, essentially, because internally the instructions aren't handled as CISC -- they are decoded as internal RISC-y micro-ops. So the RISC vs CISC debate is tired and irrelevant in the desktop arena. Let's leave that debate for the 80's and 90's. There is nothing inherently more stable about the G4's vs Intel either. In my own (also anecdotal) experience I've seen the reverse about Apple's PowerPC vs Intel Macs.

[gpat]

I am going to both laugh and cry when I see a Macbook "Pro" with a dumb ARM chip.

[brdeveloper]

Originally Posted by KnightWRX

You mean like how Linux is developed for :

- x86
- MIPS
- SPARC
- PPC
- Alpha
- ARM
- IA64
- tons of others I'm not thinking...

There is nothing surprising about Apple having a portable codebase if a bunch of open source hippies can do it.

But ARM ? ARM ? What's the value there ? Performance per watt is no better than Intel. The reason ARM processors are so energy efficient today is because they lack the sheer number crunching capabilities of x86 chips. Intel proved with Medfield that x86 is as power efficient as ARM, if they also sacrifice number crunching. There's even an Android phone that runs on a Medfield SoC!

What about a 32-core ARM processors in a Macbook Air? Same performance per watt, big redundancy... you can turn on-off as many CPUs you need on a certain time. If you need doing something faster, you can basically split a task into various parallel threads. Also, you can place two separated 16-core ARMs in the case for better heat dissipation or other design constraints.

In other words, looks like ARM is a new RISC-like approach. If you need speed, you can basically do a lot of simpler stuff in parallel to reach your performance requirements.

I'm not a computer engineer but moving to ARM doesn't look a so bad idea as much people are saying.

[unobtainium]

Originally Posted by mariusaz

And take note Apple, this is where I jump ship.

Jump ship to where? It's conceivable that all or most PCs will become ARM-based in the next decade. This is the tech battle of a generation coming up (intel vs. Arm). Intel is reaching down, ARM is reaching up, becoming more and more powerful.

[iZac]

Long live 68k! None of this new fangled PowerPC rubbish!

EDIT:

Joking aside - If Apple ever decide to pull a Win 8 where their OS plays both mobile and desktop fields on the same interface, then having a unified architcture sure makes a lot of sense. Whether it's X86 or ARM or whatever crops up in the future - as long as it deliveres better performance, I'm all for it.

[nuckinfutz]

Originally Posted by brdeveloper

What about a 32-core ARM processors in a Macbook Air? Same performance per watt, big redundancy... you can turn on-off as many CPUs you need on a certain time. If you need doing something faster, you can basically split a task into various parallel threads. Also, you can place two separated 16-core ARMs in the case for better heat dissipation or other design constraints.

In other words, looks like ARM is a new RISC-like approach. If you need speed, you can basically do a lot of simpler stuff in parallel to reach your performance requirements.

I'm not a computer engineer but moving to ARM doesn't look a so bad idea as much people are saying.

Yup. The CoreLink 500 sound pretty interesting as an interconnect.

http://blogs.arm.com/embedded/819-ar...bit-biglittle/

[bwhli]

I hope this doesn't happen.

[EssentialParado]

Skating to where the puck's going to be, not where it's been.

[holmesf]

Originally Posted by brdeveloper

What about a 32-core ARM processors in a Macbook Air? Same performance per watt, big redundancy... you can turn on-off as many CPUs you need on a certain time. If you need doing something faster, you can basically split a task into various parallel threads. Also, you can place two separated 16-core ARMs in the case for better heat dissipation or other design constraints.

In other words, looks like ARM is a new RISC-like approach. If you need speed, you can basically do a lot of simpler stuff in parallel to reach your performance requirements.

I'm not a computer engineer but moving to ARM doesn't look a so bad idea as much people are saying.

Because programming such a machine would be a nightmare, and Amdahl's law rears its ugly head. Most consumer tasks (outside of graphics) have a limited amount of thread level parallelism, which is why CPU designs favor a handful of very complex cores instead of a vast array of simple cores. There's a reason Intel makes the choices it does. It's not stupid.

[darkplanets]

Originally Posted by nuckinfutz

Yes. The upcoming Cortex A57/A53 can be linked in up to 16 cores. If this is the case we're going to have to see if Apple can take many core support in OS X beyond Grand Central Dispatch.

Perhaps there's going to be a better way of routing threads across so many cores.

Perhaps, but perhaps not. I don't trust Apple to innovate at this point in time -- they're entirely focused on visual design.

The problem is that this switch doesn't make sense really. Unlike the Intel change, which was prompted by PowerPC development failures (thanks to Moto/IBM), switching to ARM confers no real benefits aside from power consumption and a greater control over chip die and architecture. It's not like the ARM chips are going to outperform any regular Intel chips (Atom aside) -- Intel is currently king. Intel will likely stay king as well, and with next gen chips around the corner, what then? Would it really be prudent to switch to ARM considering all the pain that comes with it?

Also, if we start getting into a segregated OS bit like MS... oh man. Anything that's gimped is destined for failure (like Windows RT...).

[joelypolly]

Originally Posted by iZac

Long live 68k! None of this new fangled PowerPC rubbish!

Long live Apple II! None of this new fangled Macintosh Rubbish!

Progress and change can be a bit unsettling but people need to realise that Apple moved with a steady pace over the last 30+ years changing things that everyone else thought would be a bad idea to change.

People's perception of computers have changed a lot over the 20 years and will continue to evolve until the computer is just an extension of the mind.

[nuckinfutz]

Originally Posted by darkplanets

Perhaps, but perhaps not. I don't trust Apple to innovate at this point in time -- they're entirely focused on visual design.

The problem is that this switch doesn't make sense really. Unlike the Intel change, which was prompted by PowerPC development failures (thanks to Moto/IBM), switching to ARM confers no real benefits aside from power consumption and a greater control over chip die and architecture. It's not like the ARM chips are going to outperform any regular Intel chips (Atom aside) -- Intel is currently king. Intel will likely stay king as well, and with next gen chips around the corner, what then? Would it really be prudent to switch to ARM considering all the pain that comes with it?

Also, if we start getting into a segregated OS bit like MS... oh man. Anything that's gimped is destined for failure (like Windows RT...).

Apple's like many companies. The innovations are incremental and then WHAM they put a ding in the universe. ARM could be the next big thing but in the next 5 years we're going to need to see some breakthroughs in parallel computing and filesystems. I wonder why a HFS+ replacement is taking so long.

[faroZ06]

Originally Posted by brdeveloper

If you need doing something faster, you can basically split a task into various parallel threads.

I don't know very much about this, but I'm pretty sure that you can only do that with programs specifically designed and well-suited for it. Maybe you can split Safari into a task for each webpage plus a master task, but I doubt you could take advantage of all 32 cores with very many apps.

I have an 8-core Mac, and I really only use the power of all 8 cores when I have a bunch of different apps open or something that can multithread and use all 8 cores. There is that one app I have that can do that, and it's pretty amazing. My UPS beeps frequently, complaining of overload, when I do that

[zephonic]

Here's a wild idea, what if Apple invests in bio- or quantum computing? Who needs Intel when you can have a CPU that is a million times more powerful and uses only a fraction of the power?



----------

Originally Posted by nuckinfutz

I wonder why a HFS+ replacement is taking so long.

Because it's too hard to explain to customers why they need it.

And Apple doesn't want users to have access to the file system anyway...


John Siracusa from Ars Technica has been complaining about this since forever:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/7/

[shurcooL]

Originally Posted by kcamfork

If this is true, I guess my 2012 mbp will be my last Mac...

Didn't people say the same about the last PowerPC Macs?

[Tee1up]

"back in 2005, dropping PowerPC chips because of issues with power consumption and limited availability of high-performance processors."


It was the move to intel that got me to purchase a Mac. Moving away to a proprietary chip will likely mean that all the third-party software I depend on will be gone for months if not years. BAD IDEA. I really hope Mountain Lion is not my last Mac OS.

[namethisfile]

Originally Posted by holmesf

Yes, ARM is RISC-y. But so is Intel, essentially, because internally the instructions aren't handled as CISC -- they are decoded as internal RISC-y micro-ops. So the RISC vs CISC debate is tired and irrelevant in the desktop arena. Let's leave that debate for the 80's and 90's. There is nothing inherently more stable about the G4's vs Intel either. In my own (also anecdotal) experience I've seen the reverse about Apple's PowerPC vs Intel Macs.

were you using leopard or tiger? i thought tiger was the most stable from my experience, which i was using at the time for photoshop and video editing on the powerbook.

whatever. ARM could present a unique and different architecture for this "post-pc" company.