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

[Zdigital2015]

No, they weren’t. I was there, in the UK, in Western Europe and Eastern Europe too if it matters so much to you (feels ad-hominem to me).

The world didn’t care much about the Mac then, and again without Jobs or Intel, history will probably repeat itself.

I specifically mentioned Eastern Europe as it was only 7 years out of the end of the Cold War and I assume Apple had very few vendor partners there versus Western Europe where they had both established partners (Apple France)and manufacturing (Cork). It’s not a sleight, it was a reality back then. iMac G3’s abounded back then.

History will not repeat itself and this one-sided prostrating to Intel as if they are God’s gift to computing is just astounding. Without money to buy off Microsoft and OEMs and threats of slow CPU shipments, they would be toast. Sooner or later there will be a reckoning.

You fail to remember that Apple now has the iPhone, the iPad, the Watch, the AirPods, the AppleTV and the HomePod as ambassadors and gateway drugs to the Mac, not just the iPod. Allowing Apple Silcon Macs to run iPhone and iPad apps is going to drive so much new business Apple’s way, it’s not even funny.

Too many people here are desperately clutching their Dell mid-towers and their copy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider and giving us opinions that are completely irrelevant in today’s computing world.

PS - Jobs has been dead for almost a decade. Apple is valued at between 1.0 and 1.5 TRILLION dollars. in who’s world is that failure? Do you think he would have done better? Let it go, let him Rest In Peace.

 

[NT1440]

Yep. One would expect the savvy users to wait and see what the performance/cost ratio is, plus emulation/virtualization options and performance. And then make an informed decision.

Today? Not informed.

...that’s, that’s just not how any *consumer* makes electronic purchasing decisions today.

People don’t run through consumer report entries in their minds.

The “average” Mac buyer is going to benefit immensely from this shift in coming years.Tech enthusiasts may look down on regular people for not running cost/performance analysis when buying a computer, but that misses the entire point of *consumer electronics*.

A MacBook with 15+ hour battery life claims is going to move millions upon millions. None of those buyers have even heard of GeekBench or whatever ever other performance benchmark suites are. They don’t care, and I don’t blame them for not caring.

 

[theotherphil]

I may get one last MacBook Pro with Intel CPUs, but after that, as a computational geophysicist, I'm afraid I too will be done. I can't see any promise of community based numerical codes running efficiently on these machines in a virtual environment. Or even getting them to run to start with. Really disappointed. Off to Dell for Ubuntu laptops. In a fantasy world I hope that Razer will take note and release Ubuntu laptops.

They announced this like 4hrs ago - the vast majority of the world has yet to digest the news, let alone promise compatibility with your minority use case. FWIW, Wolfram already have ARM support so I can’t see them (or anybody else) not developing for Apple Silicon.

 

[NT1440]

Ah sorry, Im not sure to be honest. I was caught up in someone else asking about if it’s “aarch64”. But the wiki page does specifically say the microarch is armv8.4a. How much that’s just complying to a spec and how much is an arm design is for someone wiser than me to say.

Yea that’s where I get lost too. Any adults in the room with relevant knowledge to share? Lol

My current best understanding is that Apple does all of the SoC design, and that it merely licenses and adheres to it working with ARM instruction sets, which is a separate thing than the design of the chip itself. My layman’s understanding is the instruction set is the lowest level “language” (I know I’m reaching on that one) a chip uses to communicate with the rest of the hardware.

 

[Tagbert]

Planned obsolescence..

Would you prefer unplanned obsolescence?

 

[damienbutt]

Does anyone know what this really means for running Windows, both natively and through virtualization? I noticed Craig was quite careful to not mention virtualization with Windows. Only "other" environments, like "Linux". Also no mention at all of Bootcamp. It's all very concerning, to be honest.

I'm so glad I got my new MBP last November. That will last me for at least 5 years. After that, well if I can't run Windows it's simply a deal-breaker. From what I saw it feels like they are trying to turn the Mac into a huge iPad with a built-in keyboard. To make such a huge change to the OS now when Catalina is still completely unstable is just madness. Even on the latest public beta, I am still getting kernel panics every few days, the clamshell mode is completely broken. I have to get it out of the dock and open it up to wake it up each morning! It's ridiculous. Why not just get your house in order first?

I'm not a Windows lover either, although I do think Microsoft is doing some good things at the moment. I love my Mac but as a freelance developer, I require Windows for work as some of the tools I have to use are Windows only. I would love it if I could go Mac only but it's just not possible.

If Apple doesn't get this right I think they are going to lose a lot of customers.

 

[startergo]

Paid devs only - which is fine and acceptable. It's a limited program open to those of us with apps that need updating, not for general public to nab.

So the only requirement is a paid developer account? No other hidden requirements?

 

[joeblough]

That’s not quite right. By the way, Exponential tried to use PowerPC as the “core” around which an x86 chip was built. Anyway, there are always little CISC-isms that creep into everything, so there is never a real RISC core at the heart of any x86-64 machine. But it’s certainly not like the real old days where there is a massive amount of spaghetti logic tied to hundreds of control signals and massive pipeline exceptions for different x86 instruction formats.

well sure, it was a simplification... maintaining the architectural state of the x86 machine is probably pretty difficult with such a design and there's no way to really keep them separate. but anyway i'm sure there are hooks you can put in that would make emulation of x86-64 a little easier.

i think one of my friends worked at exponential (or was it transmeta?? i'll have to ask him)

 

[cfurlin]

Did you actually watch the keynote? Any part of it?

Probably not. Self-righteous indignation is more fun.

 

[NickName99]

You can't just dump CPUs onto a motherboard and expect performance. Things like shared access to buses and memory (especially when L1-3 caches get involved) make things very complicated/expensive.

Hence my comment about the motherboard costing a bit more 😉

 

[cmaier]

well sure, it was a simplification... maintaining the architectural state of the x86 machine is probably pretty difficult with such a design and there's no way to really keep them separate. but anyway i'm sure there are hooks you can put in that would make emulation of x86-64 a little easier.

i think one of my friends worked at exponential (or was it transmeta?? i'll have to ask him)

Big difference between transmeta and exponential. . I was at exponential - i later interviewed at transmeta and walked out when it was clear it was not going well.
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So the only requirement is a paid developer account? No other hidden requirements?

No, but they may not pick you.

 

[Nugget]

2. Parallels can run windows, you can even see the windows icon on the screenshot of the linux vm and docker running (look at the dock)

This is false. The virtualization they demonstrated was running Debian for ARM. There is zero reason to expect ARM Macs to support x86 virtualization. This is the end of Boot Camp and the end of meaningful Windows virtualization in macOS.

 

[thisismyusername]

Does anyone know what this really means for running Windows, both natively and through virtualization? I noticed Craig was quite careful to not mention virtualization with Windows. Only "other" environments, like "Linux". Also no mention at all of Bootcamp. It's all very concerning, to be honest.

We can only speculate about the future of Windows on a Mac. Linux, however, is much easier since it has been running on ARM for years and is readily available.

 

[Nugget]

So the only requirement is a paid developer account? No other hidden requirements?

The page says that quantities are limited and that approvals will favor developers who already have applications on offer in the App Store.

 

[Boomish69]

As a Mac user since 1994, I am pretty excited about this!!!

Funny as a Mac user from around the same time, I’m depressed..it’s all over for my professional work with a Mac. why would I buy an Intel a Mac, it would lose half its value instantly if not more, within two years it will no longer be supported. I remember all the problems the pro audio industry had when the Power PC switch happened, it took some developers years and many didn't survive.

 

[NT1440]

Funny as a Mac user from around the same time, I’m depressed..it’s all over for my professional work with a Mac. why would I buy an Intel a Mac, it would lose half its value instantly if not more, within two years it will no longer be supported. I remember all the problems the pro audio industry had when the Power PC switch happened, it took some developers years and many didn't survive.

You could start by not exaggerating. How the hell is any machine sold today not going to have support in two years?

 

[4God]

Well, now that we know that Macs and Mac apps will run on Apple Silicon how long before we can get Final Cut Pro on iPad Pro....? Now please.....thank you.

 

[theotherphil]

Try running a SPEC CPU benchmark.

The iPhone XS & XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets

www.anandtech.com

 

[joeblough]

Big difference between transmeta and exponential. . I was at exponential - i later interviewed at transmeta and walked out when it was clear it was not going well.
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No, but they may not pick you.

yeah transmeta was a VLIW play if i remember and exponential was a bicmos PPC right?

they were both hot at the time which is why i conflate them

 

[Gerdi]

I disagree. Low level drivers are much more performance sensitive (especially in gfx) and much more dependent on system architecture and hardware. It's not the same code at all. Some will be in assembly but more importantly the chips that the driver is talking to are completely different. If Apple doesn't provide Nvidia with the relevant information, then Nvidia can't do much about it in practice.

The driver is talking to is a discrete GPU connected via PCIe. There is no single dependence here to CPU architecture. So the code is _IDENTICAL_. On the lowest level you are getting all the relevant system information (e.g. bus, device and functions) via PCIe device enumeration and i am sure MacOS has an interface for that.

 

[diddl14]

You’re misreading that. That’s Apache printing out the request coming from Safari, so it’s just the identification string coming from Safari on the host machine (I imagine it’s pretending to be “Mac OS Intel” so that during testing it wouldn’t accidentally reveal that it’s really ARM in server logs offsite). It‘s not 100% clear, but it appears that the Linux instance is just virtualized and not emulated (that is, it’s the ARM version of Debian).View attachment 926045

Yes, definitely looks like virtual machines do not support intel based OS’es. Unless the final silicon adds some magic to Rosetta and the hypervisor...

 

[Nugget]

You could start by not exaggerating. How the hell is any machine sold today not going to have support in two years?

Intel Macs purchased in 2020 are still going to be receiving software updates in two years, sure. But we've learned today that they will for sure be an evolutionary dead end and will die a slow and un-glorious death of attrition and neglect as Apple and all third-party developers shift their focus to ARM solutions. Facing that reality, it really does seem like the best path is to switch to a better platform now instead of later. Why forestall the inevitable? For those who need x86/amd64 compatibility there's no incentive to go down with the ship on macOS.

For us, the choice now is whether Linux or Windows is the least-objectionable alternative, and to get on with the migration.

 

[startergo]

The page says that quantities are limited and that approvals will favor developers who already have applications on offer in the App Store.

I just read the agreement. You actually lease the equipment and the developer materials for 1 year for 500USD

 

[Boomish69]

Intel mac sales are gonna tank badly. Who would buy into a dead platform ?

Like buying a Powermac G5 in 2006.

And all those poor sods that bought a New MAC Pro, how long before that’s dropped form the OS plus developers are not going to support both for long. What a blow to the pro Mac users ! But iPhone users out number them so much I can see why Apple wants to move on...I’ll keep my iPhone & iPad but this will be my last work Mac. It’s too much pain
I can easily switch to PC & run the same software ( as horrid as it will be on Windows) & with AMD bring out some far more exciting multi core CPU‘s it has to be that for the future for me.

 

[cmaier]

yeah transmeta was a VLIW play if i remember and exponential was a bicmos PPC right?

they were both hot at the time which is why i conflate them

That’s correct. Transmeta did some sort of on-the-fly translation to target different ISAs. Didn’t work too well.

My ph.d. Research was a bipolar risc processor, so i fit right in at exponential. Though they had something else entirely going on in Austin, which ended up being Intrinsity, which apple bought.