Apple Testing ARM Based Mac Prototypes with Large Magic Trackpad?

[JustinePaula]

I agree, iOS is barely able to run a mini ipad, let alone a 13inch "professional" Mac laptop...

Apple should stop hiring celebs, rather spend $1m at U of C @ Berkeley, and MIT, establish departments of technology, harness the creative power of students...Then slap that into a macbook pro, just do not use epoxy or solder!!

 

[antonis]

Good luck convincing (again) all the s/w houses to write their s/w for a different processor. It would be a suicide. Luckily, I believe this won't happen.

 

[xmichaelp]

iOS has a file system, we just don't have ready access to it.

Well yeah... That's my point.

 

[JustinePaula]

Maybe a new Processor would help plug the holes in OS X Mavericks..

 

[lolkthxbai]

Apple's A7 chip has really come a long way. People have no idea of what they carry in their pockets. Apple is not afraid to "experiment" on release products and gauge how well they perform. The iPhone 5s, I think, is a perfect example. It would also make sense as to why they would shrink the die of the A5 chip in the ATV from 122.2 mm^2 to 37.8mm^2; pushing for smaller real estate which would lead to better battery life and more room for more components. Because of this and all the rumors of an ARM based Mac I think the rumored 12" iPad pro/rMBA is really a new product, not meant to replace any existing product and it'll be very "affordable" compared to the Mac but more "pricey" than an iPad device.

 

[smulji]

Apple's A7 chip has really come a long way. People have no idea of what they carry in their pockets. Apple is not afraid to "experiment" on release products and gauge how well they perform. The iPhone 5s, I think, is a perfect example. It would also make sense as to why they would shrink the die of the A5 chip in the ATV from 122.2 mm^2 to 37.8mm^2; pushing for smaller real estate which would lead to better battery life and more room for more components. Because of this and all the rumors of an ARM based Mac I think the rumored 12" iPad pro/rMBA is really a new product, not meant to replace any existing product and it'll be very "affordable" compared to the Mac but more "pricey" than an iPad device.

I agree. It would definitely fulfill Tim Cook's mantra of new product category in 2014.

 

[Ddyracer]

This really is bad news. There are still some ppc apps that I wish I could run on mavs. It might not be as bad as the ppc-intel transition because apple has more devs/users on OS X-- but it will be a long time before all your apps are working well and compatible.

Hopefully they will at least have something like Rosetta again and then of course drop that too. I really hope this is just a rumor.

 

[shansoft]

It worked so well for MS, why not /s

No it does not...

MS already regret for moving forward to Windows 8 RT, since all OEM pretty much drop it off their production line due to compatibility problem.

No one bother to use it because it only works with ARM specific software.
Why use Windows then?

Same logic applies to Mac. The reason why PPC->Intel x86_x64 is because performance problem. If we are not having any and still constantly improving with low cost, why moving it to ARM and cause outrages to the community?

It sounds quite stupid to me if they are really thinking about marketing.

Most likely they are testing to see the potential of it and if something happened to Intel, they will still have a backup plane.

 

[alphaod]

I can see Apple adding a dual processor machine that lets you boot into regular OS X and then run iOS apps (hence the larger trackpad) via the ARM processor.

 

[azentropy]

Compared to intel or IBM, they are tiny. They are even smaller now than they were then.

The current "Motorola" is not the same company what-so-ever.

Motorola was quite large at the time of the first PPC production - over 120K employees. It was much larger than Intel at the time. They spun off their Semiconductor Product Sector (SPS) in 2004 and it became Freescale. Freescale was about and still is about 20K employees.

When Apple announced the move away from PPC it wasn't a great loss to Freescale as Apple was a very minor customer. Freescale still does PPC today, as well as ARM.

 

[MacLC]

The article mentioned 4-8 quadcore ARM chips. I have no idea if that makes up the difference or not. But would be nice to have a laptop that doesn't get so hot and noisy.

You are right. The difference will be based on the scalability of software.
For most PC usage not related to music/video/image editing/rendering or games, one could conceivably simultaneously run 10 separate apps at full speed with 16 total cores and not notice slowdown.

Where Intel chips currently shine over AMD or ARM is in floating point power, where Core/core, thread/thread, Intel is 2-3x as fast. Since most apps only utilize 1-4 cores anyway, you could add 100 4 core ARM chips to a laptop and it would still under-perform a traditional MacBook Air with its dual core i5 CPU in editing/rendering.

Personally, my Core2Duo-based mac is fast enough and the iPhone 5S benches about equal with it. So for me, I'd be happy with an ARM-based mac if the apps ran at native speed IF the effect was a less expensive system. If the price does not change, Apple would need to have a seriously good value proposition for me.

 

[dyt1983]

You should also include ON Semiconductor as a previous spinoff from the SPS, as they also developed low power embedded processors for Motorola, so likely part of the PPC heritage. They're still quite large as well.

The current "Motorola" is not the same company what-so-ever.

Motorola was quite large at the time of the first PPC production - over 120K employees. They spun off their Semiconductor Product Sector (SPS) in 2004 and it became Freescale. Freescale was about and still is about 20K employees.

When Apple announced the move away from PPC it wasn't a great loss to Freescale as Apple was a very minor customer. Freescale still does PPC today, as well as ARM.

 

[usarioclave]

Good luck convincing (again) all the s/w houses to write their s/w for a different processor. It would be a suicide. Luckily, I believe this won't happen.

For a bunch of apps that would involve adding one switch to their XCode project. And testing, of course. Apple would have to sample the app store apps to see how many really use x86 assembly. I doubt many do these days, but you never know.

But when you think about what people do with their computers, it's hard to see why they need an i7/i5/i3. Facebook, mail, youtube, etc - how much power do you need?

Maybe apple could have a freemium laptop - free for ARM, pay to unlock an i3/i5/i7. That would be hilarious. "More power when you need it."

 

[Marx55]

The main problem is incompatibility with the rest of the world (read Windows and Linux on Intel x86). Hopefully Apple will keep the Mac x86, or they will repeat previous catastrophic mistakes. In such a case, the only way would be migrating to Windows.

Actually, what Apple should do is just the opposite: eventually migrating iOS to the x86.

 

[goobot]

I can see Apple adding a dual processor machine that lets you boot into regular OS X and then run iOS apps (hence the larger trackpad) via the ARM processor.

Or they can just make a hybrid machine, keyboard section guts of a mac, screen has guts of an iPad, connect through a lighting port with thunderbolt added in so it can work fine together, you can either disconnect the iPad and use alone or put it on back wards and flip down, use as mac, or use with keyboard but in iOS mode for watching movies and typing documents. 12" iPad plus retina MBA in one.

 

[focacciaman]

I would be using my iPad for all my computing needs if I had a way to manage my iPad without the need for OSX. More specifically I want to be able access music, photo and movie libraries from external storage device like I do in OSX (I have large iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie libraries on my external hard drive). Also I would want to access files in general from an external storage device and finally I would want to be able to archive mail mailboxes that I am no longer using.

 

[scomil]

A big reason I switched to a Apple is because I could dual boot windows (and run it in a VM at basically native speed). As much as I like OSX, most of my work still requires windows, so if they switched to ARM, I'd be switching back to PCs

Totally agree. Returning to a proprietary chipset would invalidate the Windows-in-a-VM/bootcamp use case and I believe it will begin a defection away from the Mac for many who, although they like the Mac, will realise that ARM based Mac adds little once they have to buy a Windows PC to sit next to it.

 

[wikiverse]

Why not a big iPad with attached (or detachable) keyboard?

So it seems the Surface RT was ahead of its time.

 

[iMcLovin]

If this is true, I hope apple have plans to make their OSX and ARM chip working even better with windows. If Macs turn into a machine which hardly communicate with windows computers and getting windows through BootCamp or an emulater won´t be possible anymore, it would be catastrophic...I would use a mac over a PC for as long as I can, but if there´s suddenly a ton of hurdles to be a profesional developer on the Mac I would have no choice than to switch to pc.

 

[xmichaelp]

Sorry, but its you who don't seem to understand how things work. Recompiling a modern OS X application to ARM takes literally one push of a button. There is no additional optimisation needed, no fixes and no rewrites — unless you are doing something extremely exotic in your app. Its just download the new Xcode version, rebuild your app and resubmit it to the app store. The same application can contain native code for both Intel and ARM version. OS X was designed with this kind of flexibility in mind from the start.

Can anyone confirm this? I always hear it would be way harder than that. Wasn't PPC to Intel way more of a mess?

 

[hobsgrg]

No it does not...

MS already regret for moving forward to Windows 8 RT, since all OEM pretty much drop it off their production line due to compatibility problem.

No one bother to use it because it only works with ARM specific software.
Why use Windows then?

Same logic applies to Mac. The reason why PPC->Intel x86_x64 is because performance problem. If we are not having any and still constantly improving with low cost, why moving it to ARM and cause outrages to the community?

It sounds quite stupid to me if they are really thinking about marketing.

Most likely they are testing to see the potential of it and if something happened to Intel, they will still have a backup plane.

They wrote "It worked so well for MS, why not /s", the /s means they were being sarcastic

 

[xmichaelp]

Apple is nowhere near the level of performance Intel is and it never will be.

Quite the bold statement there. If Apple keeps up it's pace of doubling performance every year it's only a couple years away from eclipsing intel. Plus they can just add more cores and clock to close the gap. AND the article clearly states they will run multiple processors. Power is not an issue.

 

[Serban]

So if they go with ARM MAC, i will still be able to play league of legends or starcrat? No because they are only for Intel/Amd cpu right?
And im very sure there are more apps

 

[xmichaelp]

Is there a big financial incentive to do this? Almost makes you sorry for intel.

Heck yes there is. Intel processors in MBAs are like what, 300 bucks? Two Apple chips would be like 100 bucks.

 

[shompa]

MacBidouille have always been right.
They have real inside sources. They posted PowerMac G5 specs over a year before it was released for example.

ARM based Mac prototypes have been around for at least 3 years.

People need to look at benchmarks: A7 is faster per mhz than Intel i7ULV.
But that is not the most important.

By controlling the CPU like Apple does with iOS Apple can optimize the CPU.
For example A5 30% of the die area is for specific Apple stuff like DSPs for Siri.
This would give Apple a huge competitive advantage against generic X86 that relies on brute force instead of optimization.

And the price:
A7 costs Apple 18 dollar to produce. X86ULV + motherboard cost 350-400 dollars. Intel is abusing it monopoly in X86. Thats why X86 have stalled since 2006 when AMD could not compete.

2006-2014: Intel single threaded performance is up 50%.
50% in 8 years!

ARM/Apple Aseries is up over 4000% in performance since 2007.

ARM have at least 10 companies that create custom ARM cores and compete. Since ARM just charge a licensing fee = its cheap. We get competition that don’t exist in X86, we get REAL 64bit instead of X86-64bit extensions.

(its amazing that X64 is 3% slower than 32bit in Windows. Real 64bit gains 20-30% performance by recompile stuff in 64bit. Real computes moved to 64bit in 1990. Not because of the myth 4gig memory, but because of performance)

Intel charges 4400 dollar for its fastest CPU. It cost Intel less than 300 dollar to produce that CPU. (People who for example think Nvidia/AMD high end GPUs are expensive: They cost more to produce than 10 core/20 thread Xeon. Largest Xeon is 470-480mm2. Nvidia/AMD are over 500mm2. Intel have no competition = charge 4400dollars. Nvidia/AMD compete and sell its GPUs without real profit. The profit for Nvidia/AMD is their compute/WS versions of the same card.)

Please die X86. 40 years old. Never good...