Why would they need 4-6? The ONLY reason for that now is Intel wants to have a tiered pricing structure so they can charge more for more performance. There’s no tiered pricing for either iPhone or iPad, they just keep old ones on the market for folks that want them.
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Apple Silicon: The Complete Guide
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Intel sells dozens of chip models. If Apple had, say, just two, what would they be? One for Mac Pro and another for everything else?
Are these new "fantastic' arm cpus going to have x64 compatibility? If yes, sure, go ahead and bring arm to the mac. If not, I don't see this being a good idea, unless they want to just be a mobile/tablet company in terms of computing.
Thinking that they can beat Intel/AMD...just laughable. Benchmarks mean nothing.
Thinking that they can beat Intel/AMD...just laughable. Benchmarks mean nothing.
Yes, at least for ditching 32-bit support now. When Apple releases ARM-based Macs, both Intel and ARM-based machines will run the same software.
Think about what would happen otherwise. The Mac line isn’t going to switch all at once. There will be a transition period. If consumers had a choice between new Macs that ran old software and new Macs that didn’t, what would they choose?
One thing that will make this migration even trickier is that I suspect Apple doesn't have a transition layer comparable to Rosetta in place.
Not until the vast majority of iPad apps are fully mature and usable on macOS I see that happening. Based on Catalina and Catalyst, a lot of iOS devs are just wrapping their heads around the changes and how to implement. It will take a good two to three years before everyone starts feeling comfortable with the changes (dust settles). I believe Apple would still work with some key developers like AutoDesk and Microsoft to have the native, robust desktop versions of their apps on an ARM-based version of macOS. I believe Adobe Photoshop for the iPad is part of this strategy of making it easier.
Considering it's still not mature enough and Illustrator is still a year away; probably in a limited state, I don't see Apple implementing an A-Series in a clamshell until about 2023. The likely target will be a MacBook Air type device.
There is no doubt, probably had macOS running on the A-Series since about A7. When Phil Schiller the A7 SoC as a desktop-class 64-bit chip, thats when I knew Apple probably already compiled macOS for it.
Someone mentioned macOS is annoying. I don't get the point of that. It's a different tool for a different type of user or some users and does what it does well for millions. There is nothing annoying about it, but I understand for Apple, they want to consolidate resources not just for money, but also for many developers. The dream of write once, run anywhere. Its gonna be a long journey, but the way I look at it, it's probably not gonna be here until the second half of the next decade.
Considering it's still not mature enough and Illustrator is still a year away; probably in a limited state, I don't see Apple implementing an A-Series in a clamshell until about 2023. The likely target will be a MacBook Air type device.
There is no doubt, probably had macOS running on the A-Series since about A7. When Phil Schiller the A7 SoC as a desktop-class 64-bit chip, thats when I knew Apple probably already compiled macOS for it.
Someone mentioned macOS is annoying. I don't get the point of that. It's a different tool for a different type of user or some users and does what it does well for millions. There is nothing annoying about it, but I understand for Apple, they want to consolidate resources not just for money, but also for many developers. The dream of write once, run anywhere. Its gonna be a long journey, but the way I look at it, it's probably not gonna be here until the second half of the next decade.
Not really. The Surface Neo will use Intel's new "Lakefield" processor. It's actually following a similar strategy as Apple's recent mobile CPUs, combing a fast "Core core" for high performance tasks with low-power Atom cores for other tasks in a package.
The challenge is going to be 3rd party native software support. It won’t just be a simple recompile to get native apps from Adobe, Microsoft and everyone else.
The performance advantage could be worth it though, if even a fanless A12X iPad Pro CPU rivals 6-core Intel i7 CPUs. This would be a game changer for the MacBook Air that currently runs dual core 1.6Ghz Intel i5 CPUs. 2-3x the performance AND more battery life, yes please.
The performance advantage could be worth it though, if even a fanless A12X iPad Pro CPU rivals 6-core Intel i7 CPUs. This would be a game changer for the MacBook Air that currently runs dual core 1.6Ghz Intel i5 CPUs. 2-3x the performance AND more battery life, yes please.
Citation needed.
Assuming that Apple, which has spent years making their A-series processors perform optimally in their phones... would then just plop those same phone processors into their Macs, which have a substantially larger budget for space, power, and cooling... seems naive.
Kuo recently stated that there will a new MacBook with scissor type keyboard in second half of 2020. That's likely separate from Macbbok Pro 16 which rumored to be shipped to Apple in volume soon and released soon too. Therefore one can hope that Kuo really meant a MacBook, as a MacBook 12 successor. This fanless ultraportable would be prime candidate for Arm.
For the Macbook Pro lineup it sounds like a disaster at least. I love the mac for being "best of both worlds", for having both MacOS for working and Windows for gaming. Or whatever you need Windows for. I would hate to lose native Windows support (full support, not emulated compatibility).
Especially since they often don't even use the exact same iPhone processors in iPads, Watches, AirPods, or touchbars (etc.), but instead create customized SOC physical designs, optimized for the power or performance envelope needed by that particular product space.
So if they do have another ARM chip in the lab for macOS, its physical design, layout, and packaging are most likely optimized for a significantly higher power and thermal dissipation budget, which means higher bandwidths, higher clock rates, and less throttling needed at high utilization levels. e.g. not just an A13.
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Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and most others have likely already recompiled their newer 64-bit code for ARM. So, if not simple, mostly already done anyway.
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Apple has millions of developers paying $99/annum. In order to keep that revenue stream, as well as to keep building their App Store and Arcade Game catalog, Apple needs some low-cost machines that allows developing, testing (automated), building, and debugging sophisticated apps with Xcode (or follow-on) and command-line tools (lldb, xcrun, etc.)
Debugging apps means it can't have a purely controlled-app ecosystem...
... at least for those paying the $99/annum. Developers.
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There are a few answers to this question:
In short, running x64 (Intel) based OSes will require emulating the x86 architecture (rather than virtualizing it). It will not be possible to natively boot an x86 OS. It is notoriously difficult to emulate a CISC architecture on RISC and there will be an extreme performance hit in doing so.
That said, there are already Arm versions of many popular OSes including many variants of Linux and even Windows. These Arm based OSes would run in a virtual machine, just like x64 (Intel) based OSes can now.
Back in the PPC days there were in fact emulators available and in the hey day PPC was so much faster than intel that the performance hit still resulted in tolerable performance when the host Mac was extremely powerful. I don’t think that same advantage will exist today.
Another method from back in the PPC days were intel coprocessor expansion cards that allowed running x86 application and even full OSes natively. Apple even made a first-party “PC Compatibility Card” for some models. Today this might come in the form of a thunderbolt connected Intel chip that is able to share the Arm Mac’s other resources (RAM, Graphics, etc).
Probably another reason they're going to make the switch, eventually.
Sorry, but this whole section is wrong.
Intel's chips haven't been purely CISC since the original Pentium, and modern ARM chips have a far more "complex" instruction set than that original Pentium did. The "Reduced" in "Reduced Instruction Set Computing" is likewise out of date. Modern Intel CPUs actually have at their cores instruction sets that are completely different from the original x86 instruction set - and use firmware-based "translators" to execute regular x86. Ironically very similar in function to the early '00s Transmeta CPUs. (Although Intel CPUs use micro-code that is actually far similar to old-style RISC than Transmeta's VLIW.)
ARM is just more efficient in current implementations, regardless of RISC vs CISC. Even Intel got far more efficient with the move to the "Core" architecture from "NetBurst" at the time of the PowerPC-to-Intel transition. It is very conceivable that Intel could come up with far more efficient x86 CPUs in the future, too.
And, ironically, with Apple being willing to completely dump 32-bit compatibility in the latest macOS, they might help push Intel to dump some cruft from their CPUs, allowing for more power-efficient CPUs.
They definitely do it as "Arm" all through their website. I also think it's an acronym but as far as their branding goes, they like "Arm"
Ha, indeed. MacRumors was not wrong for spelling it that way.
That being said, ARM was ARM for decades, and they tried to switch to Arm/arm in 2017. I say "tried", because it is not an easy thing to do, what with a gazillion of websites, documents and even textbooks about ARM and the ARM architecture. So it is no surprise people will think "Arm" is a mistake. I was not aware of this change until today.
Moreover, ARM is being rather silly about it, as they really want everyone to change the spelling. There was even an ARM employee on Wikipedia who tried to change the spelling everywhere (including old CPU designations), claiming that their spelling guidelines were "authoritative" and that everybody must follow them.
Dear ARM, maybe you can impose this on your license holders, but not on the general population. If people say you are ARM, then you are. And having learnt now just how silly you are being with this, I will take extra care to refer to you as ARM in the future.
Thanks. Those are good points, but no way for our University. We constantly work with such applications, no solution for EndNote and many others, and we need to work offline many times. And no, the Office (or Apple) applications are not compatible between hardware platforms unless they have the same CPU. Experiences proves that.
As said, no Intel x86 Mac will force us to switch to Windows, which we do not like, but our work is the most important thing to consider for us. Did Apple learning something from the old PowerPC fiasco?