Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor

[Bruno Castelló]

I get it.

You need bootcamp to run windows on a Mac.

So same old "If Apple not supporting Windows I will go with Windows."

Then please get what you want and build a real gamming PC.

I have iMac and 3900x + 2080Ti PC yet you consider I'm not a gamer. Fine.

I had a gaming PC before and I was a pro SimRacer before, and a very good one, better than you can imagine. I do not want to mantain two computers any more. I will not go the ****** hackintosh route, I want BootCamp and its the end of story. The x86 2018 MacBook Pro can run F1 2019 and iRacing on BootCamp perfectly fine. Absolutely great.

You can perfectly be a pro gamer with iRacing on BootCamp in a Mac. Perfectly fine. Even iRacing advises that on their webpage for Mac users.

You don't need a high end PC to play iRacing, and this is the most fascinating thing about x86 and this game in particular, because iRacing's engine is based on NR2003 (on steroids).

 

[Mr. Dee]

It is an assumption that MacOS will be running on ARM at this stage. It really wouldn’t surprise me that these laptops aren’t just a clam shell iPad taking advantage of a slightly larger form factor for increased thermals and battery.

I see Apple using key differentiators from the Intel based ones, which will still stick around for a while:

- Battery life is the immediate stand out - if you want a notebook that genuinely can last all day, this is it.
- The app store, I don't expect to see a push from developers writing apps from a scratch, this is more about accessing the existing library of applications for iPad. Apples slogan, millions of apps ready - might not be the robust apps you prefer, but it will have a large collection available.
- 5G - this is likely to be what makes it a key differentiator. Users have been asking Apple to include cellular modems in their notebooks for years, they haven't budged. But Apple will say, if you want that in a clamshell, this will be your best option to get that.
- macOS Desktop experience - Apple will of course push this as a different category of device, but also being careful, this sets up the Mac for the next 20 years and provides a smooth transition into the future.

What might even happen is the macOS user land functionality is just rebuilt on iPad OS and grafted with some of macOS power user features like support for multiple displays and true desktop multi-tasking.

 

[MikeZTM]

I had a gaming PC before and I was a pro SimRacer before, and a very good one, better than you can imagine. I do not want to mantain two computers any more. I will not go the ****** hackintosh route, I want BootCamp and its the end of story.

You can perfectly be a pro gamer with iRacing on BootCamp in a Mac. Perfectly fine. You don't need a high end PC to play iRacing, and this is the most fascinating thing about x86 and this game in particular, because iRacing's engine is based on NR2003.

Game of The Year 2017 is not a game.
PCMR can do better than you. Really.

I never said a bad word about iRacing yet you attacking all different kind of games.
F1 2019 is joke if you really care about physic simulation -- there's a type of racing game called arcade racing and codemaster's game mostly are considers half arcade-half simulation.

Life for speed/iRacing are all the way simulation. I doubt you really paid more than I did on racing games. I'm not good at them but still enjoy them.

"Not a computer" with ARM can run your game so a computer with ARM can not?

 

[theluggage]

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, keep lying. It's not that simple as flipping a switch. I also pay for an Apple Developer account, I've developed a few little apps (for macs only) before and I know it is not THAT simple.

What, you mean that when you write your Mac OS app in XCode you don't see a checkbox that says "compile this program for the upcoming super-secret ARM-based Mac that hasn't been announced yet and probably runs OS X 10.16 which hasn't been announced either..."? Gosh, I wonder why that might be...

If/when Apple release a version of XCode with MacOS-on-ARM support - there will be something like an "ARM" checkbox (and probably an ARM+x86 'fat binary' option) and your "few little apps" will almost certainly compile and run on ARM.

Maybe what you mean is that you can't just compile your Mac apps for iPad - but that's because Mac and iPad have different operating systems (which actually have a lot in common but use different libraries for handling application start/stop, user interfaces, file access etc.) - but that's nothing to do with x86 vs ARM.

I've been working on some code that receives MIDI and drives a multi-channel USB audio interface to generate control signals, envelopes, low-frequency sine/triangle/sawtooth waves etc. to control a synth. It runs on both x86 MacOS and a ARM-based Raspberry Pi - the code is 99.9% identical because it is written using Unix/Posix calls and a third party library for portable audio programming (probably written on an x86 but builds fine on the Pi). ARM vs. x86 doesn't come into it, even when filling sound buffers at audio rates, using multithreading and locking. Compile it on the Mac and you get a Mac binary, compile on the Pi and you get an ARM binary. Strictly no assembly language needed - even on the Pi4 it can generate audio-frequency sine waves (which wasn't really the plan) by calling the freaking floating point Sin function 44100 times a second. Modern computers are fast...

Seriously, if you're writing processor-dependent source code at application level in 2020 then you're holding it wrong. Drivers, rendering engines etc. may be another matter, but, frankly that's a job for the OS and not having it hard-coded in applications is a Good Thing.

 

[Bruno Castelló]

Game of The Year 2017 is not a game.
PCMR can do better than you. Really.

I never said a bad word about iRacing yet you attacking all different kind of games.
F1 2019 is joke if you really care about physic simulation -- there's a type of racing game called arcade racing and codemaster's game mostly are considers half arcade-half simulation.

F1 2019 physics aren't perfect, and I never said they were. I said about the graphics. The best F1 game graphics out there. iRacing comes a close second place in terms of graphics because iRacing does not have wet-weather races. But physhics wise, iRacing is the best out there.

Bet just little millenial boys like you voted for the silly 2017 game of the year...

As for someone doing better than me, I have to say I am also a pro kart racer. You can't even compete against me.
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What, you mean that when you write your Mac OS app in XCode you don't see a checkbox that says "compile this program for the upcoming super-secret ARM-based Mac that hasn't been announced yet and probably runs OS X 10.16 which hasn't been announced either..."? Gosh, I wonder why that might be...

If/when Apple release a version of XCode with MacOS-on-ARM support - there will be something like an "ARM" checkbox (and probably an ARM+x86 'fat binary' option) and your "few little apps" will almost certainly compile and run on ARM.

Maybe what you mean is that you can't just compile your Mac apps for iPad - but that's because Mac and iPad have different operating systems (which actually have a lot in common but use different libraries for handling application start/stop, user interfaces, file access etc.) - but that's nothing to do with x86 vs ARM.

I've been working on some code that receives MIDI and drives a multi-channel USB audio interface to generate control signals, envelopes, low-frequency sine/triangle/sawtooth waves etc. to control a synth. It runs on both x86 MacOS and a ARM-based Raspberry Pi - the code is 99.9% identical because it is written using Unix/Posix calls and a third party library for portable audio programming (probably written on an x86 but builds fine on the Pi). ARM vs. x86 doesn't come into it, even when filling sound buffers at audio rates, using multithreading and locking. Compile it on the Mac and you get a Mac binary, compile on the Pi and you get an ARM binary. Strictly no assembly language needed - even on the Pi4 it can generate audio-frequency sine waves (which wasn't really the plan) by calling the freaking floating point Sin function 44100 times a second. Modern computers are fast...

Seriously, if you're writing processor-dependent source code at application level in 2020 then you're holding it wrong. Drivers, rendering engines etc. may be another matter, but, frankly that's a job for the OS and not having it hard-coded in applications is a Good Thing.

You cannot just simply flip a switch and hey presto, heres your ARM based app. This does not work that way, is not that simple.

I never wanted to compile apps for iOS and I will never do so. Not of my interest to work with ARM.

I'm sorry, but your "cross-platform" project has no real useful meaning for me. I'm sorry to see you are a masochist for doing that painful work for yourself compiling for a platform without no future.
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Life for speed/iRacing are all the way simulation. I doubt you really paid more than I did on racing games. I'm not good at them but still enjoy them.

"Not a computer" with ARM can run your game so a computer with ARM can not?

LFS physics were worse than rFactor. I never needed to pay for my racing games - I got them all free thanks to friends and game partners. The only I really paid for (because it was worth it) was iRacing.

"not a computer" or a computer with ARM cannot run my games as of now, end period.

 

[MikeZTM]

F1 2019 physics aren't perfect, and I never said they were. I said about the graphics. The best F1 game graphics out there. iRacing comes a close second place in terms of graphics because iRacing does not have wet-weather races. But physhics wise, iRacing is the best out there.

Bet just little millenial boys like you voted for the silly 2017 game of the year...

As for someone doing better than me, I have to say I am also a pro kart racer. You can't even compete against me.
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You cannot just simply flip a switch and hey presto, heres your ARM based app. This does not work that way, is not that simple.

I never wanted to compile apps for iOS and I will never do so. Not of my interest to work with ARM.

I'm sorry, but your "cross-platform" project has no real useful meaning for me. I'm sorry to see you are a masochist for doing that painful work for yourself compiling for a platform without no future.
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LFS physics were worse than rFactor. I never needed to pay for my racing games - I got them all free thanks to friends and game partners. The only I really paid for (because it was worth it) was iRacing.

"not a computer" or a computer with ARM cannot run my games as of now, end period.

ARM not equals iOS.
ARM Mac is just a checkbox away from your current Mac app.

It really is just a switch and you got a ARM app. Compiler always doing the heavy lifting for you even on Intel. You never even knows how different Intel CPU are for the past decade.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

This is going to be the death of the Mac computers as a whole. Arm Macs won’t have any compatability with any of the software available until the software developers update their software and most will be left behind. Microsoft tried to transition to ARM with the Surface Pro X and Windows 10 on ARM has been a failure. I expect this to fail as well, especially since ARM will probably not have the same performance for all tasks compared to X86-64.

Microsoft always does processor transitions wrong and Apple has gone through numerous transitions with fairly little pain. You obviously haven't been with Apple very long, but trust me, it'll all work out.

Apple's ARM CPUs will likely tie or exceed Intel, especially in a larger device with active cooling, based on available benchmarks of current processors.

 

[high heaven]

They will need to rewrite them, so you will have to spend a lot more of your money to pay for subscription of these apps again. Same thing that happened with PPC to Intel transition; Many people had to pay for a new version for Intel.

They will port their current version to ARM just like how they ported PowerPC version to x86 last time.
Windows version already running on x86 yet no one port their windows version to Mac at that time. They all ported the PowerPC version.

I dont know who is telling the truth here.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

I dont know who is telling the truth here.

Mike is correct. Very few apps and libraries use assembly, and the ones that do usually have fallback C (or whatever language they use) code for portability. For most devs, this transition will be fairly pain-free. There may be some libraries which need to be tweaked to support Mac on ARM (many preprocessor macros take the platform AND architecture into account), but generally speaking, the transition should be quite easy.

On top of that, you can guarantee that Apple will provide a compatibility layer so that existing software can run 100% unmodified, like they have always done with processor transitions. The consumer will likely not notice in most cases.

 

[MikeZTM]

I dont know who is telling the truth here.

At least I'm not trolling about games.
My Linux codes runs perfectly well on Raspberry Pi just like how it runs on my x86 server.

Same goes for Mac. If Apple provide the toolchain you can just check a check box and that's it.
This is exactly the same 14 year ago when Apple moved from PPC to x86.

It was one checkbox(in fact a text field you have to type "x86_64" in) that time and will be a checkbox this time.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

This is a hello world C program code.
You will notice it is human language like and not 0 and 1s CPU could read.
This code will runs fine on any CPU that have a working C compiler. Compiler will convert this code into a real program binary in 0000110101010s format.

The only difference between this simple code and a huge application is those Apple provided API and frameworks, which are controlled by Apple and obviously they will provide ARM version if they want to release an ARM Mac.

 

[smulji]

The merging of iOS and OSX is forthcoming.

Apple has been pretty adamant for a few years now that they’re not merging iOS & macOS.

 

[ct2k7]

Apple has been pretty adamant for a few years now that they’re not merging iOS & macOS.

Maybe converging rather than merging.

 

[high heaven]

Mike is correct. Very few apps and libraries use assembly, and the ones that do usually have fallback C (or whatever language they use) code for portability. For most devs, this transition will be fairly pain-free. There may be some libraries which need to be tweaked to support Mac on ARM (many preprocessor macros take the platform AND architecture into account), but generally speaking, the transition should be quite easy.

On top of that, you can guarantee that Apple will provide a compatibility layer so that existing software can run 100% unmodified, like they have always done with processor transitions. The consumer will likely not notice in most cases.

At least I'm not trolling about games.
My Linux codes runs perfectly well on Raspberry Pi just like how it runs on my x86 server.

Same goes for Mac. If Apple provide the toolchain you can just check a check box and that's it.
This is exactly the same 14 year ago when Apple moved from PPC to x86.

It was one checkbox(in fact a text field you have to type "x86_64" in) that time and will be a checkbox this time.

So there will be no or less compatibility issue for porting x86 software to ARM based Mac?

 

[Aston441]

Off topic, but I had one of those too. I think it used a Trasmetta Crusoe processor with no processor registers and used something called "code morphing" technology.

It was a super cool little laptop, but I sold it after about a year.

Ah yes, you are correct. It was remarkably well built, as nice as anything Apple ever made, and had a touch screen and little eraser mouse thing. I probably used mine about 4 years, after which time Windows updates bogged it down just too much to be usable any more.

 

[MikeZTM]

So there will be no or less compatibility issue for porting x86 software to ARM based Mac?

There will be less compatibility issues for porting x86 app to ARM based Mac.

But the issue is there have to be someone to do the port. If a application is already abandoned then you are in bad shape.

For commercial software it's still depends on their will to port it or not.
I still remember Microsoft port Office to x86 in 2008 that is 2 years after Mac transitioning to x86.


This time I think it is much better as Mac are much more popular than it was 16 year ago. And PC market as a whole was tired of Intel's toothpasting year after years.

WWDC 2005 - Apple to Move to Intel Processors in 2006

www.anandtech.com

This old article shows how easy it was to port PowerPC software to Intel.

 

[smulji]

A Desktop ARM will never beat a Desktop x86

That’s an assumption, not a fact. How well an ARM SoC performs is dependent on the chip designers.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

So there will be no or less compatibility issue for porting x86 software to ARM based Mac?

The fact that the code is running on an x86 or ARM CPU is almost completely abstracted away from the developer. Yes, porting will be easy in almost all cases.

 

[ctrlzone]

This is going to be the death of the Mac computers as a whole. Arm Macs won’t have any compatability with any of the software available until the software developers update their software and most will be left behind. Microsoft tried to transition to ARM with the Surface Pro X and Windows 10 on ARM has been a failure. I expect this to fail as well, especially since ARM will probably not have the same performance for all tasks compared to X86-64.

Arm is the Future.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

I want the same drugs you are using to have a such unrealistic dream. A Desktop ARM will never beat a Desktop x86.

Actually, recent benchmarks of Apple's ARM processors have shown that it does very much have the potential of competing with Intel's Mobile CPUs at the very least, especially if you factor in the active cooling those laptops will have compared to an iPhone which has only passive. If they can scale it up to desktop-level performance in the same way that Intel has scaled their desktop CPUs down to mobile performance, it seems very plausible that Apple could compete, if not beat Intel's offerings.

At the end of the day, it all depends on the skill of their engineers. Apple is dominating in the mobile space with their ARM processors, so it's clear there are some very talented people working there.

 

[Nugget]

As for someone doing better than me, I have to say I am also a pro kart racer. You can't even compete against me.

You're probably better than I am in the simulators. I really only use the sims to learn a track before I drive them in real life. They don't let the karts out on track with the adult cars, so we might never have a chance to go wheel to wheel together. Keep the shiny side up, though.

 

[throAU]

Tell me if any ARM based computer can run this game. I know they can't.

I just had to edit my post and make a bolder "computer" word so just I get my point straight and that I am speaking about computers not video game consoles.

Not yet, because no sufficiently potent ARM based hardware has been released for desktop computers yet.
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They will need to rewrite them, so you will have to spend a lot more of your money to pay for subscription of these apps again. Same thing that happened with PPC to Intel transition; Many people had to pay for a new version for Intel.

The "re-write" will be more of a recompile unless Adobe are completely incompetent and have their head in the sand regarding hardware development, and write their own low level libraries in assembly language rather than either using apple APIs or at least portable C code.

Oh wait...

 

[smulji]

Their recent mistakes and after Catalina dropped 32 bit support, even my dad is ready to leave that ship to return to Windows. One of his favorite apps TextWrangler, is only 32 bit and will not be upgraded. He does not want to use their successor (BBEdit) and is freaking furious at how Apple keeps changing the things in the OS all the time. Plus, his camera surveillance apps for our home does not work on mac either, so he is ready to leave the ship. I'll be ready too, if Macs go only ARM based.

Then leave. Like anybody really cares

 

[Michael Scrip]

Actually, recent benchmarks of Apple's ARM processors have shown that it does very much have the potential of competing with Intel's Mobile CPUs at the very least, especially if you factor in the active cooling those laptops will have compared to an iPhone which has only passive. If they can scale it up to desktop-level performance in the same way that Intel has scaled their desktop CPUs down to mobile performance, it seems very plausible that Apple could compete, if not beat Intel's offerings.

At the end of the day, it all depends on the skill of their engineers. Apple is dominating in the mobile space with their ARM processors, so it's clear there are some very talented people working there.

That's my thought as well.

Some people think Apple will just put the same iPhone/iPad A-series chips into a laptop.

But imagine if Apple actually designs different chips specifically for the body size and battery capacity of a laptop!

If Apple can make world-class chips for tiny mobile devices... I can't wait to see what they do with a bigger device.

 

[throAU]

There is no desktop computer running an ARM cpu with powerful GPU capable of running my games.
There is no desktop computer running an ARM cpu running the apps I need to use at work.
There is no desktop computer running an ARM cpu with all of the above plus macOS and Windows on BootCamp.

And there never will be. Therefore, the ARM based "computers" are useless to me. They are just toys for you to open or close the door of your garage.

There isn't an ARM computer that does that yet because no one has built one.

There is no reason an ARM based machine can not use a third party GPU, in fact a lot of ARM based machines do exactly that.

Your "never will be" statement sounds like some guy talking about Silicon Graphics workstations vs. the PC in 1991.

It's extremely short sighted and ignorant of the moves being made by people making hardware.

If you think Raspberry Pi is all arm is capable of being you're extremely misinformed.

The Raspberry Pi is deliberately built to be as cheap as possible for access to students for little money.

Expecting that to compete with a top end x86/amd64 processor is like comparing apples with bicycles. The x86 machines that try to compete in that price segment are dogs.

ARM is scaling up, and WILL kill x86, just like x86 killed the mainframe.

 

[high heaven]

There will be less compatibility issues for porting x86 app to ARM based Mac.

But the issue is there have to be someone to do the port. If a application is already abandoned then you are in bad shape.

For commercial software it's still depends on their will to port it or not.
I still remember Microsoft port Office to x86 in 2008 that is 2 years after Mac transitioning to x86.


This time I think it is much better as Mac are much more popular than it was 16 year ago. And PC market as a whole was tired of Intel's toothpasting year after years.

WWDC 2005 - Apple to Move to Intel Processors in 2006

www.anandtech.com

This old article shows how easy it was to port PowerPC software to Intel.

The fact that the code is running on an x86 or ARM CPU is almost completely abstracted away from the developer. Yes, porting will be easy in almost all cases.

Then what will be the main issue with ARM based Mac if the compatibility is not an issue? Performance?