Thats correct, it is just quite a bit more than just the instruction set. In fact it describes many system level properties like exception levels, virtualization, security state, event monitors, endianess, memory model, virtual memory architecture and many more aspects.
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Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year
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Thats correct, it is just quite a bit more than just the instruction set. In fact it describes many system level properties like exception levels, virtualization, security state, event monitors, endianess, memory model, virtual memory architecture and many more aspects.
How does one start looking for the “beginner” type information to start understanding these concepts. I’m always fascinated by the chip tear down articles but at a certain point I start drowning in jargon and nuance.
What this WILL mean is a return to the days of FAR fewer applications for Mac. As a professional Adobe Premiere user, I can only cringe at the thought of what the new translation of that app will look like. They had a hard-enough time squashing bugs on the cross-platform Intel version, now they'll have half the number of developers.
Definitely terrible news for pros, decent news for my kids, who only know Apple from iPads and iPhones.
Definitely terrible news for pros, decent news for my kids, who only know Apple from iPads and iPhones.
I find Apple computers are always a step behind with processor generations. For example, the 16" MBP has a 9th generation Intel, but it's competitors have 10th gen. With the new ARM chips, this will make comparisons very confusing, which is probably a benefit to Apple. We will be comparing the latest Intel gen-x chip on a Dell to the latest ARM chip. Personally, I prefer AMD processors at this point and a move to ARM is a disappointment.
I’m just wondering how anyone can be satisfied with Adobe’s absurdly lazy development these days. It’s like they arbitrarily picked a number of cores to lock things at, or still pin things on the CPU that would be faster if offloaded to the GPU. What’s up with that? Out of a subscription model no less!What this WILL mean is a return to the days of FAR fewer applications for Mac. As a professional Adobe Premiere user, I can only cringe at the thought of what the new translation of that app will look like. They had a hard-enough time squashing bugs on the cross-platform Intel version, now they'll have half the number of developers.
Definitely terrible news for pros, decent news for my kids
The instruction set is actually RISC, which is what PowerPC was. ARM licenses specific architectures which are version, or more specifically an implementation, of RISC.
Apple isn't actually moving to ARM. They are using ARM as the basis to create their own silicon in order to return to RISC.
Apple now has enough money that they don't need IBM or ARM. They can do their own RISC design, they just haven't given it name yet other than "Apple silicone"
if they waited then the same could be said for the 2022 or 2023 MacBooks. Has to happen sometime.
Arm ARM is freely available. It certainly is not for beginners.
Arm ARM v8a
When i think back 25 years when i took computer architecture lessons at university, i can think of Henessy&Patterson as good beginners lecture.
i don't know about "beginner level" but the henessy and patterson textbooks are pretty standard for undergraduate-level computer architecture/organization. in fact i think the later versions of "computer organization" are based on ARM rather than MIPS.
yeah, no. RISC means "reduced instruction set computer" and is a broad term that mostly means "an instruction set that just operates on CPU registers as operands" or a "load/store" architecture where only load and store instructions touch memory. as opposed to CISC (which is a 'backronym' coined by the RISC guys) that refers to ISAs like x86 where most any instruction can have a memory address as an operand (or even go indirect thru memory to get it's operand.) it makes executing those instructions with modern memory management systems pretty complex.
apple is moving to ARM for the mac. they have been implementing custom designs which conform to the various ARM instruction sets/architectures for years now. they are just moving to a new level with these designs - more cores, bigger caches, more pcie lanes, better integrated graphics.
First machines at the end of the year, but maybe not all want to move to new Silicon yet.
This short article actually gives a pretty good summary in mostly comprehensible language: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/risccisc/
They need to support intel for the minimum period of :
end of last Apple Care period for that product.
The Hennessy and Patterson textbook is the best place to start.
Or we can start a thread and I can start off from the beginning and teach a class on how to design a CPU.
I think he’s saying ARM, like PowerPC, is a risc architecture. I don’t think he’s saying that RISC is an ISA
Yeah, I've been wondering about this. Windows apps like Office are 64-bit and don't run on ARM. So I don't know how Apple is going to be able to keep Bootcamp. They could develop special drivers, but I imagine they would be even worse than the current Bootcamp drivers are. Unless I see evidence to the contrary, I think Apple is going to abandon Bootcamp, and just let people use Parallels. They've got Microsoft working on porting the Mac version of Office to ARM, so those kind of big productivity programs will still be available, but only as Mac versions.
Apple ships MacBook Pros with the latest Gen as fast or faster than Dell, HP, Lenovo. I’m sure they looked over the 10th Gen and saw what a warmed over POS it is and said, “Nah, try harder, Intel.”
AMD is not as good as everyone wants them to be and the Apple Silicon is the best possible road for Apple at this point.
So you need to watch the actual sections of the keynote. They were running Tomb Raider and Maya INTEL in Rosetta on this with no slow down.
Also Seems to only take a few clicks to export a universal App from Xcode.
Adobe is already on the ball and they showed universal apps of photoshop and Others. I am pretty sure that Apple are Aiming to make the actual OS chipset agnostic with this method.
Part of the reasoning here is that as fast as the A12 is it’s not competing with The chip in the Mac Pro - at least not yet. They have to stick 20+ of them on a board - possible of course - but doubt it’s happening soon.
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Well they showed virtualisation working perfectly well - but I imagine native boot up windows could be - but to be honest who cares. Windows (currently) sucks!
I would love to work on the cpu for the next Mac Pro. Fun design problem.
Wrong...this is just the step I t he right direction towards more applications for the Mac. The ability to run iOS/ iPadOS apps out of the box is a huge boon to users and developers.
Hopefully, Adobe has their s*** together and can compile an Apple Silicon native version of Premiere to ship before the end of the year. If not, you think seriously at Resolve or FCP, instead of getting soaked for $60 a month while Adobe drag asses it for the next year. Truly worthless paying them money monthly for the incremental improvements to their dreck software.
exactly thats why i expect pro machines to be the last to transition but for "toy"/executive/cafe chilling macs eg Macbook nothing it will be fine and better than most Intel Iris graphics but until we see more i am otherwise cautiously pessimistic
I really don't think making comparisons to the PPC -> Intel transition is at all appropriate. When we speak of phones and tablets as though they're somehow "toys", we're actually way off the mark. The iPad is a very capable computer; it's just currently in a software niche where many developers/companies fail to exploit its power—at least partly because they're probably only developing for Mac and can't afford to target iPad as well. Once Apple is able to include the Mac in essentially the same device category as the iPad, I think things will change a lot for developers. You also have to keep in mind that developers looking at "supporting the Mac" now won't be limited to the Mac, but will be opening up their product(s) to the whole Apple hardware ecosystem. Which is to say that the Mac being on its own as a platform in the past offered less of a business opportunity than what we'll see going forward. Now it won't be a question of offering "Mac" support, but rather complete "Apple" support. That means billions of users; nothing like the PPC to Intel days.
You can run Windows on ARM both under virtualization and potentially under boot camp if apple is willing to support it.
The problem with bootcamp is, that apple would need to provide the Windows drivers for their hardware or at the very least a compliant UEFI. If they provide the drivers, that would be the best Windows experience of course - but writing drivers is a bigger investment.
ps. Windows Office does run on ARM of course and all Win32 ARM apps are 64 bit (though Windows does support ARM 32 bit apps as well)