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Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor
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Right, but that's just another architecture to support for testing, which can (hopefully) be largely automated. I'm not saying that there won't be growing pains, just that they will be more along the lines of testing an app locally vs testing an app in a docker container in a kubernetes cluster. Same app, but different results due to different Java runtimes, firewall rules, etc...
But for the majority of developers writing the apps, it shouldn't change too much, I would think.
Could say the same thing with Windows attempts to 'ARM' up.
So we don't know what kind of good bye or if there will be one. Hard to see that future.
Software develops will adapt or die.
The iOS market is lucrative though. Even Adobe has got on board...nice an' early. Creative apps on the iPad are very competitive.
Procreate is a speciality specialised and professional app, Affinity, Adobe, vast amount of painting/drawing apps, Manga Studio...Pixelmator etc...and even 3D apps are popping up like Johnny Appleseed.
So far we only have iPhones and small-ish pads.
But given a proper set of bigger screened iOS 'laptops' and 'iMac' style desktops...we'll see more software make the leap with the iPad to Mac transition and also 'some/many' making the move from Mac to ARM Mac.
Casualties along the way? Sure. Dinosaurs happen. They'll compete or die. And given the ultra competitive software market iOS market (something the Mac never had...) has...the old dinosaurs will have to adapt, compete or get the hell out and watch that meteor instead.
We lose Open GL. But we get Metal. Better that than 2nd rate windows conversions or games and apps.
Azrael.
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Yes. The rumours have been swirling for years now.
Azrael.
Via are an x86 licensee so most likely it was a Via x86 CPU. Transmeta did have a CPU that sort of worked like that. Was not very fast though
What kind of GPUs are these things going to have? Obviously not Intel graphics. Can you even put an AMD GPU with an ARM processor? I know Nvidia can with the Tegra series and such.
It is. Just a matter of time.
Better that than the current ginger haired step child which Macs currently are.
Apple are dragging their feet on Mac updates because they're working on ARM Macs.
The consolidated Mac OS/iOS division (?) is another clue that the hardware will follow the software.
In time.
Azrael.
Apple's notebooks have had flawed airflow + cooling designs for years causing the processor to constantly overheat and run at slower speeds. I don't want to hear excuses about Intel's bad performance before they haven't at least tried to get the best performance out of their hardware.
Or an iMac this year if you're me.
The same old 'buy it now' if you need it. It won't stop working if you if buy it now. But Apple will show no mercy phasing out old hardware and software like they didn't last time.
I'll wait until WWDC for the iMac reveal.
Azrael.
What I don't understand in some of these articles discussing this ARM Mac is references to datacentres already running ARM. Which ones? Everything that I've come across is still using x86/x64 (AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and SAP to name but a few that I work with every day) and to transition thousands upon thousands of servers to ARM is a gigantic undertaking. Having an ARM-based Mac whilst operating in server environments which are going to be x86/x64 for a very long time coming is going to be a massive pain. Fine for consumers, but for developers and sysadmins - many of whom use Macs, not so much.
If these rumours are true - Apple had better be damned sure about it, otherwise, they're going to suffer enormous earaches for quite some time.
Still short-term thinking. It’s going to be all Arm before too long, so no point in Apple dealing with the hassle of handling AMD for a few machines in the mean time.
Good question. iOS/pad/phone gpus have been potent bang for buck. I'd expect that to be the case with the transition.
Azrael.
And like Apple, Microsoft also tried to make a phone. That seemed to work out ok for Apple.
Judging from the performance in the iPad Pros I am very excited for more scaled up SoCs with beefier batteries and cooling for Macs.
You are not a software developer, are you? And specifically you are not a MacOS developer? Unless you write assembler code, and only have assembler code for Intel processors (I use some libraries which have assembler code for Intel and ARM), you just switch the compiler to "ARM", build it, put it on the App Store - that's it.
I am a professional software developer, probably been one before most posters here were born, and I ran some benchmarks on an iPhone XR vs. quad core iMac. The iPhone absolutely killed the iMac. With just two fast processors (plus four energy saving ones) vs. four processors. So that's your "probably not" against my "I ran the tests".
He basically said "ARMs can't do what I need and neither what my PC can do".
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Oh yeah, nice comparison, a little app for simple tasks on both devices. How cute.
Now try a game with both, but has to run with UHD graphics and high FPS. The iPhone will not even run it. *evil laugh*.
My benchmark is games like F1 2019 and first person high quality shooter games. If it can run these games with top quality, then you have a winner. but ARM will never do it.
This has FAIL written all over it. ARM isn’t good enough yet to surrender x86 and its billions of software for crappy mobile apps on a laptop form factor. Lololz
The PPC to Intel transition is all well and good, but this is a very different Apple than in the early 2000s. Remember, back then the company was called Apple Computer. The only big non-computer hit they had was the iPod, and that was tied very tightly to... Apple computers.
We're in a post-iOS world now, and it's been clear for a long time that the Mac is much lower priority than those devices, hardware-wise and software-wise. And it's not hard to see why: if they can convince you to use an iPad instead of a Mac, they get a cut of every single piece of software you pay for. Not necessarily so on MacOS.
My big worry is that Apple will use the ARM transition to consolidate the two platforms, locking down the Mac so that the user has no choice but to go through Apple's increasingly rental-driven App Store, renting access to dumbed down Marzipan apps or web-based junk. Functional? Sure. Up to the once-high standards of the Mac UI? Not so much.
How are we all feeling about this second option potentially disappearing? Not hard to imagine Apple flipping this switch once it's got a lock on the CPU, the App Store and everything in-between.
We're in a post-iOS world now, and it's been clear for a long time that the Mac is much lower priority than those devices, hardware-wise and software-wise. And it's not hard to see why: if they can convince you to use an iPad instead of a Mac, they get a cut of every single piece of software you pay for. Not necessarily so on MacOS.
My big worry is that Apple will use the ARM transition to consolidate the two platforms, locking down the Mac so that the user has no choice but to go through Apple's increasingly rental-driven App Store, renting access to dumbed down Marzipan apps or web-based junk. Functional? Sure. Up to the once-high standards of the Mac UI? Not so much.
How are we all feeling about this second option potentially disappearing? Not hard to imagine Apple flipping this switch once it's got a lock on the CPU, the App Store and everything in-between.
I hope I am not along thinking that this is a really bad idea if it applies across the line up. I don't have any issues with an experiment with one device (similar to what Microsoft is doing) but using the Intel family chipsets was one of the single greatest architecture things Apple ever did. I'm worried that if they splitter it too much it will fork the pro end of things who do want Xeon processors and cause divergence within macOS. 
Developer here: No. You open Xcode with your project, click on the project file, then under "Build Settings" you click on "Archs" and add aarch64 to the list of architecture (that's 64 bit ARM). Then you press "Build" and you're done.
I am a software developer and I do develop open source software for both macOS and iOS/iPadOS. I know about this since I managed to port my iOS app using Catalyst to see how it performed, but decided not to release it. This is nothing new, but I am still against the idea of ARM Macs mostly for compatability reasons with really little benefit for running apps from iOS. I own a iPad Pro with a magic keyboard can already do that without alienating the pro users by switching everything to ARM.
What does GPU intensive games have to do with the CPU being ARM? The performance is the chips are there so it is just a matter of software being availiabl4. The shift is coming Both on the Mac side and on Windows so games will be made for ARM sooner or later, which GPU we are running for that remains to be seen.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...eneration-arm-based-aws-graviton2-processors/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15253/80core-n1-nextgen-ampere-quicksilver-the-antigraviton2
The bulk of the cloud services will be on x86 for a long while. But there are small ponds of ARM forming and deployed out there.
For some workloads it won't. Edge webservers just copying cached content out to browsers wouldn't be that hard.
ARM sever CPU aren't going to take over all the workloads but there are narrow subsets where deploying them wouldn't be too hard. High scale flex provisioning of complex coupled VM/containers/etc that need to live migrate across large pools of servers? That will take some time but it will arrive over time for some customers.
That will be a problem. But it is doubtful Apple is going to make a Workstation/Server version of the ARM chip. The Bloomberg article denotes that this "Mac" Processor is still using cores that are primarily designed for the iPhone ( derivative of A14 ... just add more big cores and probably a bigger "system cache" , but the rest is just the integrated GPU and other "system parts" thrown in " that really don't make sense in a high end Workstation/Server part.
Apple could buy someone's "off the shelf" ARM Workstation/Server part but I doubt they'll be all that happy to do that. Economics don't make sense for Apple to do it themselves. ( As get higher in price the number of units sold in the Mac space is small. At some point probably gets too small to throw a silicon design team on it and make financial sense. They'll keep the baseline design phone optimized as the reference point and take whatever fall out almost for 'free' out of that for the lower end of the line up. )