Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year

[ssgbryan]

Tim said the transition will be another 2 years. Which means we could have a new high end iMac/iMac Pro or Mac Pro at 1.9 years from now. Which will be supported ~5 AFTER release. I think you are safe.

But that doesn't mean you will be getting new software during that time period.

 

[MacCheetah3]

How is your Mac obsolete?

It's not, Mactracker lists it as "Vintage" -- which may be a kind word for obsolete.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I figured this thread needed some extra comic relief even if it's cheesy.

 

[Ethosik]

And here you have it...Apple has officially ended their 'personal computer' line.

The other times Apple had a platform switch it was to address glaring shortcomings or avoid dead-end architectures. That is not the case here.

And do they really expect us to believe they can design a SoC that competes with a discrete CPU/GPU combo? They want me to believe that the A12Z GPU can outrun the 5600M?

Apple currently gets a performance bump per cycle because they don't have to go off-chip for GPU tasks. When they do (and they will have to), expect their performance to line up with everyone elses. Except now, I am locked in to macOS.

I just repurposed my 2011 13" MBP as a Unbuntu file server. Can't do cool stuff like that anymore with the Apple Silicon.

Anyone else remember using apps under Rosetta? The whole 'launch it multiple times until it works'? I really thought we were done with that crap.

A passively cooled A12Z outperformed most laptops in benchmarks and is equivalent to an Xbox One S graphically. A cooled A-series chip can have a BASE core count of 8-12 cores, maybe more and a much more powerful GPU. With multiple Low-performance cores and a lot of the other coprocessors and everything else A series chips has. Imagine having active cooled dual A series chips in a Mac Pro.

 

[AHDuke99]

The only worry I have with this is that you'll see the Mac return to the days of PPC where you had a smaller app pool or you had to wait a year for the latest version to come to the Mac.

It has also been nice to be able to run Windows when I needed it on the Mac without needing to buy two computers. I guess we'll see how this transition goes, but I would be surprised if they keep shipping new Intel macs. If I remember correctly, Apple also said they would ship new PPC macs as well after the Intel announcement, but I don't think they ever did

 

[pankajdoharey]

Apple did an excellent job of ensuring applications worked well during both 68K to PPC and PPC to Intel transitions. It was very seamless and painless. However performance was worse than on native hardware. The expectation being developers would offer native applications. Many did and many did not (likely as they were no longer in business)

Hmm that remains an issue.

 

[Plutonius]

I really hope they name the Mac chips following the old G-series. G6, G7, etc. Throw some nostalgia at it.

They will probably call it SE.

Apple seems to like that name.

 

[djjeff]

I agree its a Desktop class processor I am with you on that, but what I would like to really see is Apple beating Intel on every account no matter how you do the benchmark. The likes of Linus on Youtube should shout ohh my god for a comparable processor Apple AX chips beats intel socks out of the water.

I wouldn't be surprised that, like in the PPC versus x86 days, some benchmarks will favor ARM and other x64.

 

[KPOM]

I think it's fair to say there are 100x more developers developing in an environment that abstracts the underlying architecture than developers developing for Intel specifically. But I get your point.

I'm just saying that end-users will be puzzled by the move at first because Apple didn't explain the benefits. I got the impression that Apple wanted to say "all your favorite apps you know and love on your iPhone will have a native Mac app" but stopped short; probably because that's hyperbolic and they can't make that promise. Instead we got vague promises of power per watt and nothing else.

I know it's a developer conference, but surely Apple knows that these announcements will hit the mainstream media and news aggregators like Apple News and Google News and Facebook, and thus the masses will see it. They'll see Apple making a big move without any primary-source information about benefits to them.

We do know that iOS and iPadOS apps will at least run on the new Macs. This could be the ultimate path toward an actual “Mac Surface.” Imagine a 15” MacBook Pro in the form of an iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.

 

[Falhófnir]

I really hope they name the Mac chips following the old G-series. G6, G7, etc. Throw some nostalgia at it.

I would guess at A14M or similar, as they might well use the same ‘vortex’ or ‘hurricane’ or ‘Tempest’ (for example) core designs as in the iPhone and iPad chips, just clocked higher and more of them.

 

[dgdosen]

yes they did. They showed native Photoshop, which is not the app store.

Well, sure - it's not a selling thing yet. The question is - how will it ship when it sells?

 

[Stephen.R]

It sounds like that's the only way to use something like homebrew binaries

Home brew itself is not a binary. It’s a ruby script.

the tools it installs, it is specifically designed to install from source: it will compile the tool on your Mac. That it can install prebuilt binaries was (poorly) tacked on later.

 

[dgdosen]

I see Gruber noted on DaringFireball, and all this Apple documentation.

Is Apple ditching ARM? and going it alone as "Apple silicon"?

 

[old-mac-man]

Cost and available software are two consideration for me, regardless of performance claims.

 

[ralphthemagi]

There are some differences. These days everyone is using XCode, so it’s going to be far easier to recompile universal binaries. That’s why we’ll have Office and Adobe apps native on day one. Also there’s the entire iOS/iPad software ecosystem, running native on day one. Also we’ve got 20+ years of progress in software development. Also, Apple has more resources than any other company on the planet to help them pull this off smoothly. They aren’t the little underdog company they were in the 90s.

In a lot of ways the transition is already done. Everything has been forced into 64-bit compliance, so pretty much everything you are running is already sitting in Xcode somewhere just waiting around for a new target. Even most drivers now have to use DriverKit.

There are maybe a handful of applications that have libraries that will need to be updated. I'm sure there's a few big ones out there that will cause some delays, but most of the hard work for getting everyone into the same developer environment is already done.

 

[Orionfox]

I don't really have a dog in this hunt except I know the Intel chips allow me to play Intel PC style games. Phone games are not the same. iPad games are not he same. Console games are not the same. Apple Arcade is definitively NOT the same.

I play 1-2 games at a time, many for years at a time so if I can't run windows gams, I lose the benefits I like of the MacOS and how they tie together with all my other devices.

 

[oneMadRssn]

I would guess at A14M or similar, as they might well use the same ‘vortex’ or ‘hurricane’ or ‘Tempest’ (for example) core designs as in the iPhone and iPad chips, just clocked higher and more of them.

But come on. We can finally have the PowerBook G5 Steve promised us over a decade ago.

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

Sure, but that’s been Apples game plan for at least 5+ years now. Make a chip architecture that can scale.

I really do think people are going to be genuinely shocked when they get these things into laptops.

Well, not all compute tasks can be parallelized. Also very few applications are CPU-bound. Many are I/O-bound and a lot are not bound by anything on current silicon -> hence 99% idle state on most CPUs...

But maybe the Apple silicon even speeds up Idle!

 

[ralphthemagi]

I see Gruber noted on DaringFireball, and all this Apple documentation.

Is Apple ditching ARM? and going it alone as "Apple silicon"?

Apple's silicon is ARM-based.

 

[pankajdoharey]

I wouldn't be surprised that, like in the PPC versus x86 days, some benchmarks will favor ARM and other x64.

Like Mark Twain said "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

 

[ssgbryan]

Indeed, hence my 2015 MBP isn’t getting upgraded any time soon.

My question however, is how can that seriously be taken as a legitimate issue for normal consumers?

Do you really think that folks routinely pay for an upgrade every piece of software, everytime a new version comes out?

How many older copies of MicroSoft Office are still being used today? I'd say more than the latest copy of Office.

 

[djjeff]

There are basically two problems here: First one is that most engineering apps don't work in the Mac, and emulation is not an option for engineering. Second one is that, even if you admit buying a PC for engineering apps and then a Mac for the rest of apps, then you are locked into this new Bad Sur thing that behaves just like iOS (not only aesthetically, but in terms of user freedom as well). Putting both reasons together, time to move to Linux (and use engineering apps through VMware native performance rather than emulation).

I doubt business will do this unless they have Mac specific apps. The beauty of x86 based Macs were that you could natively run Windows and Macintosh applications on the same system.

 

[macintoshmac]

This might be the first time I posted so much in the last 10 years or so.

Apple has done transitions before. Hoping this transition solves some hardware thermal issues and software performance issues. Quality of software and who can make use of it is a discussion for another day.

 

[djjeff]

Do you really think that folks routinely pay for an upgrade every piece of software, everytime a new version comes out?

How many older copies of MicroSoft Office are still being used today? I'd say more than the latest copy of Office.

Office 2007 user here. Absolutely zero plans to upgrade as this version does everything I need.

 

[E.Lizardo]

Tim Cook said himself that Apple’s ARM chips are designed for minimal power consumption - which is great for phones and tablets, but silly for computers. Computer processors need to be designed for performance!

Power consumption is all but irrelevant on a desktop Mac, but even on notebooks, Macs have demonstrated that they are capable of using Intel and having great battery life. At best it might be a little better for the environment, but I think it is probably the screens that use the most electricity, and Macs are a very small percentage of computers anyway.

This makes me feel like my computer is going to be forced to run on a cell phone CPU - a cell phone CPU that is AWESOME, but it is awesome for cell phones. Why would I want it on my computer?

I hate to say this, but this is the first time in years I am thinking about possibly switching to Windows. I’m not saying that to try to rile anybody up, but I mean, I’m basically losing all my existing software either way now.

If it works great(and it will)why do you care what kind of CPU is in there?

 

[NickName99]

If you observe Open source projects like say https://github.com/lifting-bits/remill What it does lift X86 or ARM ISA to LLVM Bit code and once you have that you can Jit or AOT the whole thing. Since the mentioned "during install" much of it might be happening AOT, but in the presentation they also mentioned Java VM will also run seemlessly so they might also be doing some JIT + Caching.

Wow, so it kind of is recompiling and recompiling somewhat. Thanks for the link. They sure didn’t have that tech for the 68k and PowerPC emulation layers back in the day!