Apple likely to use A11X in its Laptop.

[TheRealAlex]

I have been reading rumors that Apple will use one of its A series CPUs in a MacBook or MacBook Air as it tries to move away from Intel dependence. And I dismissed the idea.

Then I saw this.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/18/sprint-free-4g-lte-snapdragon-pc/

https://www.qualcomm.com/solutions/mobile-computing/laptops

These devices go directly after Apples iPad Pro and MacBook Air market.

So now I do actually believe the rumors that an A11X will power some type of MacBook.

 

[afir93]

Interesting.

Why the A11X though? The rumors about Macs with custom-made chips by Apple talked about a debut in 2020, no? The A11X (assuming that's what this year's iPad Pros come with) would be 2 years old by then.

And that's without considering that the TDP, internal space, etc. in the respective Macs are most likely different from this year's iPads, so there's no telling if just re-using the iPad chip in some MacBooks would even work. I'd rather guess that Apple will start a completely new chip series for the Macs that's based on the current A-/A-X series but isn't a 1:1 copy of it.

 

[TheRealAlex]

Interesting.

Why the A11X though? The rumors about Macs with custom-made chips by Apple talked about a debut in 2020, no? The A11X (assuming that's what this year's iPad Pros come with) would be 2 years old by then.

And that's without considering that the TDP, internal space, etc. in the respective Macs are most likely different from this year's iPads, so there's no telling if just re-using the iPad chip in some MacBooks would even work. I'd rather guess that Apple will start a completely new chip series for the Macs that's based on the current A-/A-X series but isn't a 1:1 copy of it.

Well if Microsoft can use a Qualcomm 835 to run Windows In a Laptop. An A11X would destroy a 835. Unless MacOS has much higher overhead and needs a beefier CPU.

 

[New_Mac_Smell]

Well if Microsoft can use a Qualcomm 835 to run Windows In a Laptop. An A11X would destroy a 835. Unless MacOS has much higher overhead and needs a beefier CPU.

Really depends what you want to accomplish with a computer though doesn't it. Everything's a balance, and Microsoft using an 835 allows for a very good battery life, but that's all... It'll be a fair few years before an A11 is capable of running complicated software at an acceptable level, and putting it in a MacBook or Air would be fairly pointless, as you'd have the same capability as an iPad. People buy the Air over an iPad for a reason, and it's to do computer related tasks.

It'll happen one day, when and if there's a need or a benefit. Currently, there's little to gain in ditching Intel, and a whole lot to loose. Not to mention development time and architecture changes forcing software developers to rewrite.

 

[jerryk]

Would they also support Windows? Or would bootcamp users be abandoned?

 

[afir93]

Would they also support Windows? Or would bootcamp users be abandoned?

This is unknown at the moment.

There are some people who are going on about how a switch to Apple's own CPUs would be terrible because this would mark the end of Bootcamp and native Windows support, but don't let that mislead you – these people are currently solely making these judgments based on speculation and hearsay, not on anything concrete.

There certainly is a chance that it'll mean the abandonment of Bootcamp, but it's equally possible that the new architecture will continue to support running Windows, or that it won't support it natively but that Apple will have some emulation software similar to Rosetta for PowerPC software that will make running Windows possible (potentially with some performance drawbacks, which would probably be negligible since the big deal about switching to their own architecture would be that yearly performance leaps would be much larger than they currently are with Intel).