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Apple Developing ARM-Based Mac Chip to Handle Low-Power Functions Alongside Intel Processors
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If I wanted an iOS device I'd buy an iPad.
While this might seem like an improvement to some, rather the camel's nose under the tent of OSX. Most everything wrong with the MBP in particular and all Macintosh can be tied directly to Tim Cook's fascination with iOS devices and disdain for the strengths that created Apple in the first place.
While this might seem like an improvement to some, rather the camel's nose under the tent of OSX. Most everything wrong with the MBP in particular and all Macintosh can be tied directly to Tim Cook's fascination with iOS devices and disdain for the strengths that created Apple in the first place.
When they get rid of x86-64, that will be the last Mac I own. The main reason why MBP is so useful for software developers and other engineers is due to flexibility. You can have both support from Linux and Windows. ARM support on both platform is just awful. Running x86 through simulation will only drag the performance down even further.
Reminds me of the Amiga concept of offloading specific functions to smaller processors the competitors don't use. With the stagnation of processor power improvements, this could be a nice way to differentiate, and make the machines more powerful. Hopefully it won't just be used for 'thinner'.
What? You get an ARM coprocessor on board and the only use they found is to automate stuff that I don't want to be automated? Come on!!
I'd certainly welcome an ARM coprocessor, but only if I can use it for running ARM Mach-o fat binaries on it, with full access to main memory and to the full Cocoa API.
Interesting: if Apple were to marry an ARM CPU and Intel CPU into the same device, how would they handle switching between the two? Will Apple come up with a new form of binary executable program that can run on both processor architectures? or will they be running two binaries for these programs?
Apparently, you've never actually used any of that "iOS" versions of their software. They are literally TOYS compared to the full desktop versions and this is where Microsoft is cleaning house with their Surface products because they CAN run the full desktop versions quite well whereas something like the iPad Pro can't run jack squat. There is NO MARKET for the iPad (people running iOS want FREE or $1 apps and almost NOTHING ELSE) and software companies don't want to develop real power products for markets that don't want to pay real ('amigo') money for those products. Hence why there is NO INCENTIVE to make a full featured Photoshop for an iPad. They would lose money on it. You can't take a desktop system seriously that doesn't have REAL applications, not toy/junior versions made for on-the-go little elements.
But they were going from something obscure to something mainstream, so it was only a matter of time before things got a LOT BETTER. What exactly would get "better" under ARM other than battery life? I'm still waiting to here this. Remember, that for some time PowerPC promised better than Intel performance (hell even AMD surpassed Intel for a short bit there) but then with such a small market for the product, it pretty much fizzled out. IBM didn't want to spend the billions on R&D for no return/no market. The primary market for ARM is smart phones, not desktops. The primary commercial market for desktop software is Windows, not macOS. MacOS may actually be the best example of "trickle down economics" there is in that Mac software literally started trickling down from Windows when they moved to Intel.
That's because the Intel CPUs were SO much faster than PPC by that point that the performance for PPC Apps wasn't that terrible (unless you tried a game). ARM CPUs aren't fast enough to run an Intel emulator near real speed and as I said before, NO ONE is going to port to ARM for a handful of Mac computers if no one else (i.e. Windows) is using it mainstream. Microsoft may like to play around with ARM, but their major ARM market (i.e. the Windows phone and Surface 1) didn't exactly sell that well which is why all REAL Windows software is for Intel only.
I have Win10 on ARM. It's called a Windows Phone! I can't run Photoshop on it. In fact, a lack of Apps is the #1 reason the Windows Phones FAILED to sell to consumers. No market. No Apps. So far, I don't see a single area where my theory falls flat on its face. Your responses are jokes.
You're talking about less than a year into Intel. While there is no doubt some Halo effect, I say it's mostly delayed reaction (i.e. Intel versions of Apps finally appearing in number that run at full speed instead of crippled PPC under emulation). In other words, never buy the 1st gen product. The second generation of Intel Macs was much improved and by then Apps were catching up. Most people buying early iPhones were using Windows as much or more than Macs. Apple was even pushing Safari for Windows at the time to try and court more Windows users into thinking Apple software didn't suck. Sadly, it backfired as iTunes for Windows and Safari were HACK JOBS and it showed. They improved that to some degree over time, but most Windows users still hate using iTunes and Safari was canned long ago.
I think most CASUAL (and fanatical) users don't care (and I already said that in my previous post). I think most users that run REAL software DO care if they have a good library to choose from and anything that hurts that is going to be really unpopular. Apple has been letting the Mac go to hell for several years now (especially the desktop and pro models) and many of us are on the fence as it is because of that. I use OS X because I like the security better first and foremost (malware is a tiny tiny fraction of what it is in Windows) and I used to prefer the interface as well, but Windows has largely caught up for ease-of-use and even reliability (and always had the lead in gaming), but the malware combined with Microsoft spying on everything you do is a real turn off. Otherwise, I probably would have already switched by now given Apple's poor updates of the Mac Mini and ZERO updates of the Mac Pro in recent years.
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Running Windows on ARM is one thing. Having actual applications and games available for "Windows on ARM" is quite another. Windows SE on ARM. FAILURE. No software. Windows Phone on ARM (I even own one, but Apps aren't that important to me on a phone). FAILURE due to lack of Windows application for it. It's relatively easy to port an OS to ARM. It's not so easy to get 3rd party developers to make software for it. If Windows mainstream goes to ARM and ditches Intel, I agree it would be good for the Mac to move to ARM. But as long as Windows on ARM is a JOKE, so it is a joke for the Mac to switch. The Mac needs software and it's too small a market to pull most developers in on its own. If it's easy to port, however and there's profit to be made, you will continue to see Mac software and that's the key difference.
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And the REASON you can find that software is it's relatively simple to port most basic apps to the INTEL Mac particularly if you use common toolboxes for both. Change Intel and you're back to PPC no-man's land by comparison. Yes, there was software for the PPC Mac. But it wasn't even close to what's available now for the Intel Mac. A lot of younger people today were not around for the 1990s and early 2000 years and have no idea how sparse it was by comparison. For several years, the ONLY real browser for the Mac was Internet Explorer (and a then failing Netscape). Firefox didn't yet exist and Safari didn't either. Apple dependent on Microsoft for a browser. Think about it.
On a dual-processor ARM/Intel Macbook, there would be no "switching". Think of the Intel apps running like a Windows App runs on MacOS using Cross-Over.
Remember the first year of Tiger on Intel? The entire MacOS was running iLife Apps and MacOS on Intel natively, but only a few apps where Intel-native yet (or even universal). They had to run Rosetta which was slower. Intel Apps would still be native.
If such a thing were to come to fruitition, Apple may bring back the concept of a Universal app, containing binaries for ARM and Intel in one like during the PPC/Intel days. Intel compatibility would be automatic, but some developers may wish to build a universal version to take advantage of the ARM efficiencies (if they truly exist).
It could also run iOS apps which would give us millions of apps on day one.
It's all speculation, but I can really see it allowing Apple to build a super-efficient, long-battery-life notebook with a trackpad and a filesystem for MacOS for usability without the awkwardness of iOS (unless you wanted it).
Touchscreen? I dunno about that part. I don't think Apple wants to build a "convertible" (iPad with a detachable keyboard). Maybe they have better ideas than I do (that's almost certain).
Microsoft already showed full Photoshop running on full Windows on ARM. An x86 program runs on ARM.
No what this seems to be implying is you would have a Mac with an Intel Chip (Already runs Darwin Kernel) and you would have an ARM Chip added (Already runs Darwin Kernel), but here is the kicker:
You know how your iPhone is just on? Like all the time? Well OUR Macs could be just ON all the time, in "Super" Mac Power Nap mode. Like you would SLEEP the Mac INTEL chip, and then the ARM would just HUMMMM... doing iCloud updates for files and other stuff, etc, like our iPhones do...
THIS WOULD BE INCREDIBLE...
Citing Microsoft's failure at something as a reason Apple should not do it is not very compelling or convincing.
When I step into a conference room to give a presentation I don't care if the ports are the most powerful, etc on the market, I just need to be able to hook up to the projectors and audio system.
I still haven't heard a single reason to go to ARM, just reasons why it wouldn't be "so bad". Running Photoshop in emulation on ARM isn't my idea of Photoshop running on ARM either. All emulation is slower than the real thing.
Another proprietary Apple protocol. I hope not. I'd rather they just say screw Thunderbolt altogether and put their resources towards USB 3.x and beyond. I realize Thunderbolt is superior speedwise, but I'd imagine that Apple could help get USB on par with it.
>Better battery life (mainly standby)
>Built in cellular
>Better architecture (Intel has ****ed up x86)
>Actual competition in the ARM space
Yeah but IG, Thunderbolt is just done now. It's done. There is no reason to scrap it, and so is USB 3.x...
It's all about the sorry a$$ manufacturers who can't make a FULL Spec Type-C (USB+TB) Port, with the machines they make that want to take the easy way out and just do USB 3.x Type-C, and wait for the unknowing public to just hopefully "FORGET" about the TB part and hope it fades away, cause they SUCK and can't make it work easily and cost effective to implement it.
Where APPLE CAN...
Why better architecture? Intel chip can run software from 1981(from dos or later from windows) as well as support 64bit and 32 bit simultaneously, not to mention the long lifespan of their chips.
Well, I'm really not the biggest fan of Intel, but one thing many people do not realize is that the x86 CISC instruction set is much more densely compressed. That is also one reason why PowerPC where slower, as they had much more load on the cache and memory due to wider, fixed instruction fetch (at a time where bandwidth was much more a premium).
Intel also got their standby idle power way down during the last decade. Similar high performance ARM cpus will have a hard time competing with that on a similar performance level, ...
Why so?
Arm designed (they don't build chips so I always laugh at articles mixing up nomenclature) are RISC based while Intel chips except the Loan mobile chip used in an early Asus android phone are CISC based.
This means that early G3, G4, and G5 CPUs in early macs where RISC based considering their design. OSX Supposedly by design is CPU design agnostic and that is evident in iOS, TV OS and macOS.
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Wrong. Only the G5 had longer threads. Have a look at the Panther and PowerMac G5 introduction the reason for such high FSb was to keep the threads full at rapid speeds.
Wrong. I did not say long threads (maybe you mean pipeline anyways), I wrote about instruction size. PPC instructions are word long, four byte each. X86 are variable, one to six (or so currently) bytes. This together with implicit memory load/store results in much smaller x86 binaries, and thus smaller memory, caches utilization and less "wasted" bandwidth for instruction fetches. Leaving more for actual data to move around.
There is a reason while ARM and others followed with more compact encodings like Thumb et al.
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