The worlds leading ARM design house would be ARM holdings itself
By what measure? Seems to me by $$ apple wins.
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Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Starting Later This Year
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By what measure? Seems to me by $$ apple wins.
Actually, a better description is: ”What did not work was being dependent on someone (Motorola, IBM, Intel); else for their core technology.”
Sure, in pure quantity ARM wins. In performance Apple wins.
So I just spent $14,000 for a NEW MAC PRO with an Intel processor. Hope there will be a motherboard for MAC PRO 2019 owners when Apple Processor is out.
Apple today confirmed its widely rumored plan to switch to custom processors for its Macs, promising "incredible" performance and features.
Building on its industry-leading A-series chips for iPhones and iPads, Apple wants Macs with its custom silicon to have the highest performance with lower power usage. Apple says the vast majority of Mac apps can be quickly updated to be "universal" with support for both Intel-based Macs and those with Apple's custom silicon.
Starting today, developers will be able to apply for a special Mac mini with an A12Z chip inside to help prepare their apps for Apple's custom silicon. This custom Mac mini will be running the macOS Big Sur beta and the latest version of Xcode.
Apple said that it expects its first Mac with custom silicon to launch by the end of 2020, and it expects to transition its entire lineup within the next two years.
Article Link: Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Within the Next Two Years
One of the big questions will be how they tackle multitasking, especially on MacBooks when running on battery. Being able to run more than one app at once and having multiple windows open on your desktop is the major difference in capabilities between MacOS and the various flavors of iOS. iPhones and iPads still can't property multitask apps without killing battery life (closest we have is running two apps side by side on iPad and even that is limited) so Apple has had to do all sorts of "backgrounding" work arounds which suffice to say is not REAL multitasking. So looking forward to seeing how this plays out with new generation MacBooks running on Apple Silicon. Because if you won't be able to multitask in MacOS and not kill your battery life, then what's the point?
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Had been considering getting a Mac Mini. Think I'll hold off until that gets upgraded to ARM chips now. Hopefully my 2012 MacBook Pro will last until whenever that happens!
Yes you can! Problem is Apple doesn't sell their OS separately like Microsoft does.
"As a rule" isn't legally binding.
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A the good old days of Macs versus PCs. CISC versus RISC. Thunderbolt versus USB. It doesn't get any more nostalgic than this.
The Arm CPU isn't going to behave any differently than the Intel one. What you are describing is a function of iOS and iPadOS, specifically. Apple already has all kinds of things in place in macOS to help with battery life. GOOD GRIEF, why is this so hard for people to grasp! It’s a damn CPU swap, nothing is going to change in macOS to turn it into iOS.
Ah, that’s where you are confused, the Intel transition was announced in 2005 – you got the wrong decade!
“The game” hasn’t changed much at all, desktop machines are still fundamentally the same as they were in the 1980s - Classic Macintosh. The difference is that the dominant platforms are not now desktop PCs, but handheld computers, AKA “phones”. That phones are more important to Apple is neither here nor there in terms of desktops - they are instrinsically different things. The more Apple tries to make them the same, the worse the experience on the desktop will get. And I am of the opinion that this move is mostly likely to herald a further “integration” of palmtop and desktop OSes.
Don't worry about parts availability, you'll be able to get that motherboard on ebay for $19 once the ARM Macs have been out for a while.
I think APPLE has this one figured out it will be a good move by them.
Well, after more than 3 decades with Apple, presently using around 10 Apple devices not counting previous devices, I think this is where I say goodbye. The reason is, I need VMWare support for Intel for business software that only runs on Intel. This could be Apple's moment where it does a Nokia - choosing to go with Windows mobile OS rather than Android. I was there when Apple began. I hope I'll be around to see if this decision was good or bad. But count me out. For most of my computing life, Windows sucked. But now it's ok. I still prefer the feel of macOS, but leaving Intel is a deal breaker. Beside, I can make Linux look fairly nice with a macOS skin. And Linux is getting better too.
In your hand, not on the desktop. And frankly, the performance issues associated with any desktop chip faded into insignificance more than a decade ago. That is to say, that for 95% of what you do, the computer could do it faster than you could think it.
What this will mean is yet another round of upgrading apps in order to keep up with the hardware changes, and being moved to “software as a service”, which more or less no one with any sense wants.
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Do you mean “it will be a good move for them”?
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You’re misundrstanding his point, he’s asking if there will be an ARM-based motherboard upgrade available for his, soon to be obsolete, MacPro. I think the obvious answer is “no”. I don’t think Apple has done anything like that since the early 90s (IIci upgrade to Quadra 700).
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Um, ARM processors have historically lagged behind Intel processors with respect to multithreading performance which is why iOS has been designed the way it has. So it's still a valid question to ask with respect to how they are going to overcome this limitation with both chip design and MacOS design. Why doesn't the latest generation iPad Pro allow for a user to have more than two apps open at once side by side (three if you have an app that supports slide over) especially considering it has plenty of screen real estate to allow for more. Or, why do apps have to be reloaded if you switch away from them to another app and then switch back? These are all important limitations of the current devices running on the Axxx series chips that those of us who use MacOS are curious about.
Apple designs its own hardware for assigning threads to cores. It has nothing to do with anything in the ARM specification.
Multitasking on the ARM Mac will be exactly the same as on an intel mac. Mac is mac - moving to arm cpus does not change this.
The AArch64 series instruction set has better support for numerical calculation than X64.
It's not just a matter of ARM being faster than Intel and more power efficient, which it probably is. Globally we live in a Windows computer environment, and Apple's use of Intel made it easy to use Apple in that environment. That's why this is goodbye to Mac from me. It hurts after more than 30 years.
I see this as a further move to lock down the platform and kill serviceability, upgradability, and compatibility with non-Apple blessed parts as they've been progressing toward since about 2013. These new Macs will be basically a hardware subscription, turning into e-waste in a fraction of the time just like the iPhone and iPad for the sake of profit. It's also a gigantic middle finger to owners of the Mac Pro.
Most definitely do not want.
The Macintosh is dead.
Most definitely do not want.
The Macintosh is dead.
Almost everything is better than x64. Intel’s FP formats are messed up. The IEEE formats are much nicer.
1. Perhaps the x/y chart gives an indication of the performance benefit of the switch to ARM. Equal and exceed desktop x86-64 performance, but not by an order of magnitude. I have no doubt these are going to be full featured machines and I'm still excited.
2. I imagine a good deal of folks are going to eventually replace their ipads with with arm macbooks. (I vpn/RDP to my office windows machine and i'm platform neutral on my laptop but so i'd love to carry a macbook and phone with me always instead of phone, ipad and laptop.) I also prefer a mouse to a touchscreen still for now too.
2. I imagine a good deal of folks are going to eventually replace their ipads with with arm macbooks. (I vpn/RDP to my office windows machine and i'm platform neutral on my laptop but so i'd love to carry a macbook and phone with me always instead of phone, ipad and laptop.) I also prefer a mouse to a touchscreen still for now too.