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

[BootLoxes]

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.

I am curious as to what you define as a "pro game." After reading your posts it seems like graphics are the biggest thing you keep pointing out. Can you explain exactly what a pro game is in your opinion?

When I think of pro games I think esports. Games that fit that category include the mentioned fortnite and smash bros which for some reason you just waive them to the side because you dont like them? Both have tournaments with high prizes with fortnite being in the million dollar range.

Listing other games that come to mind would be Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V on the fighting side. On PC we have Overwatch, League of Legends, CG:GO (previously mentioned), Rocket League, Apex, and the upcoming Valorant. There are others too but these are off the top of my head.

All of those games have many pro events (excluding the in develop Valorant) with massive cash prizes and fame. You could argue that these aren't pro games, but you would be flat wrong. Just because you personally do not like it doesnt mean these games arent pro.


Looking at those games from a hardware point, the a12x chip in the ipad pro can run all of these just fine. Heck even some of the weaker A series chips can. It is just a matter of whether developers choose to bring these games onto the iPad or in the future, the arm macs.


Looking back at Crisis (since it was brought up earlier) it came out with graphics so good that no one could max it out. Everything you could do was fully fleshed out to the point where you could even shoot and break off specific pieces of a tree.

When the sequel came out they went cross platform and they had to make it run on the weaker consoles. As a result we had a stripped down suit, smaller environments, average graphics (that was later given a graphics boost dlc), and an overall dumbing down of the crisis experience in an effort to maintain that graphics window. Realistically if the first crisis was made to run on the hardware at the time, you would have seen cuts both in graphics and things you could actually do. But then again no one would have known any better since they wouldnt have had the crisis we all know to compare it with.

When it comes down to gaming, graphics are not the most important thing. I say this as a pc gamer. It is only a small part of the puzzle of a good game. Often times I find that games that push graphics to the limits end up with barren worlds or limited things you can actually do. Of course not all games fit that bill.

 

[Pearple]

I can only speak for my company, where we have both macs and PCs. People get macs to run macOS, and not windows - at least in my organization. Its actually a poor use of money for a company to purchase a Mac just to run windows.

But the iMac is still the best Windows PC.

It has the best design, smallest footprint, (will be) the most silent PC (with SSD), and is the most stable running.

If a company doesn't need a 1000 computers but lets say 10 or 20, and it needs special software that only runs on windows, then Macs make totally sense.

 

[Dammit Cubs]

Apple is not going to just alienate their user base with these processors. More likely it will be a slow transition with INTEL still supplying them chips. You can't just flip the switch without going through some transition process.

 

[LV426]

I make extensive use of (Windows) virtual machines on my MacBook for developing Windows applications and services. I can’t tell you how useful this is to me. Typically I have MacOS beavering away making use of the laptop screen, and all my work-related software running in a VM output to my large external monitor.

It‘s fast, because the VM runs close to the machine, making use of hypervisor support on the Intel CPU. Unfortunately that’s not going to work if there’s an ARM CPU under the hood. Just saying, it won’t be an easy transition for everyone.

It would certainly be for the best for Apple to have complete control of the CPU design, however. Remember those awful Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities from a while back? Your Mac is running slower than it could because of those CPU bugs patched in software. Much better if you can speedily design out those bugs in your own CPU, on your own timeline.

 

[recoil80]

Apple is not going to just alienate their user base with these processors. More likely it will be a slow transition with INTEL still supplying them chips. You can't just flip the switch without going through some transition process.

It is going to be a slow transition. The MacPro was launched only a few months ago with Intel and is going to be supported with macOS updates for a while.
I just bought the 16" MBP, even if I was expecting a similar announcement. This is likely going to be my last Intel laptop, but I'm happy I got it now. I plan to keep it for 4-5 years, then switch to ARM.
I don't think the entire laptop lineup will switch to ARM in 2021, it will take 2-3 years at least so Pros will continue to enjoy the MacbookPro with Intel and AMD graphics, same for the iMac Pro.
At some point, their entire lineup will be ARM, and then a macOS without Intel compatibility will be launched, but I'd say not before 5 years. They'll keep issuing security updates for some years, so people will continue to use their Intel machines for a while.

 

[newyorksole]

If a a guy is unwilling to pay (something like $60) for the paid version of a text editor that is his core application that he runs on his $x,000 computer, and is willing to change platform over it then he's a lunatic.

Normal people would either pay for the upgrade to Bbedit (I did, I'd used Textwrangler occasionally for years) or switch to one of the many free text editors that do still run on MacOS.
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I think when people make such a drastic switch it isn’t just because of those 1 or 2 issues. I think it’s a lot of built up frustration with Apple over the years (most of it being irrational/small things).

I couldn’t imagine being frustrated to the point where I consider going to Windows or Android lmao. Sometimes you just have to adapt to the changes.

 

[ph001bi]

It is going to be a slow transition. The MacPro was launched only a few months ago with Intel and is going to be supported with macOS updates for a while.
I just bought the 16" MBP, even if I was expecting a similar announcement. This is likely going to be my last Intel laptop, but I'm happy I got it now. I plan to keep it for 4-5 years, then switch to ARM.
I don't think the entire laptop lineup will switch to ARM in 2021, it will take 2-3 years at least so Pros will continue to enjoy the MacbookPro with Intel and AMD graphics, same for the iMac Pro.
At some point, their entire lineup will be ARM, and then a macOS without Intel compatibility will be launched, but I'd say not before 5 years. They'll keep issuing security updates for some years, so people will continue to use their Intel machines for a while.

I am with you on that one. People are panicking about something which hasn’t happened yet, against which they can’t do anything.
I am waiting for the 13/14 inch MacBook Pro update to replace my work laptop, and that will keep me going for 3-4 years. I’ll then move to ARM. If I need to replace my mini or my daughter’s MacBook Pro during that time, it’ll be ARM based, so what?
Only issue I see is the resell value of intel based hardware during or after the ARM transition. A 3 years old MacBook Pro today is still worth about 40% of its original price. This might fall to 30 or even 20% in a post intel world.

 

[sunfast]

I guess some of the last x86 Macs could still be ok Windows machines a few years down the line. It's not like PPC where there weren't many other options other than OS 9 / OSX to run on them.

I'm planning to get a fully loaded 14" MBP to replace my 2013 iMac so that should have plenty of life in it for a few years.

 

[Hessel89]

Oh please. How long are we going to hear this ARM rumor.
What's more likely is that Apple is going to make iPadOS even more like MacOS up to the point we can finally call it a true Mac replacement.

 

[ericwn]

Machine Learning.

How is that politics, can you elaborate on that please?

 

[DeepIn2U]

Did he edit in the article after you replied? Because it's there, from 2018, and they did in fact say what the poster claimed they said.

Even so, they'd only be off by 6 months or so. It's been clear Apple plans on creating ARM Mac products (if not a full transition away from Intel) for several years.

Did he edit in the article after you replied? Because it's there, from 2018, and they did in fact say what the poster claimed they said.

Even so, they'd only be off by 6 months or so. It's been clear Apple plans on creating ARM Mac products (if not a full transition away from Intel) for several years.

I wasn’t contesting of the Bloomberg article stating Apple would make its own Arm CPU’s ....

I was contenting this:

This is also the sam Bloomberg that said spy chips were on motherboards from Apple and others that could be activated for spying.

since I’m over my monthly allotment of viewing Bloomberg’s articles in full for free, I can only guess the article posted had not stated anything about Spy chips.

 

[Val-kyrie]

You've forgotten about Grand Central Dispatch?

Grand Central Dispatch - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

My point is this: whether using multiple cores or Grand Central, do not overlook the importance of CPU frequency.

AMD’s recent success with Renoir is based not on the number of cores alone, but on how fast the CPUs process threads, particularly sustained speed. Intel CPUs may boost higher initially but they decrease in frequency much more quickly and run at lower sustained frequencies overall (compared to AMD) due to the heat they generate.

We will have to wait and see how Apple’s CPUs perform, but there is currently no benchmark which can directly compare x86 and ARM, not even GeekBench, so please don’t cite it. The lack of direct comparison is covered by other sites.

The biggest problem for Apple is going to be the loss of x86 compatibility. There will be no x86 emulator and there are many of us who need this for various reasons, not just developers.

 

[Val-kyrie]

It’s certainly possible to emulate x86/64 on iOS - Qemu even works on it and I have alpine up and running. People have even gotten Windows running in a VM on the iPad.

It’s just slow.

Too slow to run many Windows programs.

The next version doesn't require licensing from Intel.

I thought it was royalty free rather than license free?

According to arstechnica, “use of the standard is royalty-free, use of the trademark is not. If OEMs want to advertise their devices as Thunderbolt 3 compatible, they'll still need to be certified by Intel—which involves a decidedly non-free hardware validation process.”

 

[chickenninja]

12 cores is really smart, as 12 has so many factorials, being divisble by 1/2/3/4/-/6 much better than 8 10 or even 16 core. 12 and 60 cores are where it’s at, while of course 360 would offer ultimate finess of hardware resources. Being able to evenly divide and distribute workloads within the largest number of simultaneous tasks all requesting various allocations of resources.

 

[PostApple2016BrainWash]

It wouldn't be surprising if Apple 12” MB and 13” Macbook Air decided to use AMD ZEN 3 in 2021 for avoiding the hassle of unnecessary transition to ARM-Architecture that can be extremely risky due to small market share of macOS and the hardware price is not cheap for lots of company to commit additional resources for supporting it.

 

[Quu]

I don’t really remember anything of the sort. I remember almost everyone being very much in favor of the switch away from PPC because it had fallen so obviously far behind x86, and people were extremely excited about the prospect of something like BootCamp.

I dunno what threads you were reading. Everyone was saying it wouldn't even happen on here and on other forums I frequented at the time (neowin.net, somethingawful etc). The rumours about the Intel switch had been swirling for years and topics relating to it were very heated in 2004-2005 with people arguing Apple wouldn't do it, it'll never happen, hell would have to freeze over first etc

I remember reading and partaking in many of these threads. One at neowin.net a guy said he'd eat his hat on cam if they ever switched to Intel (he reneged on that bet).

Keep in mind when we finally got Intel Macs, Bootcamp was not a thing. We (the community) had to hack the first Intel Mac's to get Windows to boot. Apple did not include the BIOS extensions in their EFI like PC motherboard makers did a while later which would allow Windows XP to boot.

We even had a bounty that reached like $130,000 to get Windows booting on Intel Macs before surprisingly Apple just turned around and allowed it by releasing bootcamp with the EFI extensions needed to emulate a BIOS for Windows.

Hard for me to see how they are going to sell users on the loss of Bootcamp, or some kind of Windows on ARM Bootcamp. A lot of people see Bootcamp as an absolutely killer feature. I don't see my Steam library running on Windows ARM.

I agree that this will be a difficult sell for those people but I don't think it will stop Apple going down this road. They will make a lot more money reducing their dependence on Intel chips and they'll be able to offer more performance and better battery life if their chip designing prowess holds true.

But it's risky because although Intel isn't doing so hot right now there is AMD that is doing amazingly well on the CPU front. Both companies have had ups and downs but nothing catastrophic. To move away from x86 at this juncture is risky because if Apple falters but the x86 market doesn't then they could have much slower machines than everyone else in the market.

 

[MacCheetah3]

The next version doesn't require licensing from Intel.

I thought it was royalty free rather than license free?

Yes, but more importantly, it's now part of the USB standard.

USB4 - Wikipedia

USB4 vs. Thunderbolt 3: Let’s clear the confusion for you - Dignited

 

[deconstruct60]

....
This is how x86 was just as fast at running PPC native apps when or shortly after Apple shifted (to x86) via Rosetta, and how performance on x86 running PPC software outperformed native PPC hardware in a lot of cases within 1-2 generations (Never mind how much faster x86 was by then).

Same thing will happen with ARM. Apple's software architecture enables this.

Same thing isn't likely to happen at all. A dedicated hardware x86 instruction decoders is extremely likely going to beat a software implemented one when on a common underlying fabrication process. ARM isn't magically 'better'. AMD has access to the same fabs that Apple does ( with about a 6-8 month buffer gap, but it isn't 'years' ).

x86 drove past PPC only because the fabs were different and personal computer PPC stopped. ( x86 isn't faster than optimized Power 9 ( especially on tuned SMT4 and SMT8 workloads. ). And even if caught Power 9 they were be a Power 10 released in about a year or so.

x86 isn't just Intel. Intel's fab capacity at the leading edge has stumbled but x86 isn't solely dependent upon Intel's fabs.

Motorola pragmatically killed off 68K for Personal computers in favor of PowerPC ( brief transitory stop on 88K ) . PowerPC carried on in embedded contexts ( cars, I/O signal processing/analysis systems , networking , etc. ) , but the more mainstream computers only continued in Power series. It is much easier to "drive pass" the older technology when the implementation of that process pragmatically stops. So the comparison is between "newer" ( incrementally improving ) current architecture versus frozen in time one.

x86 is not frozen in time. Software emulation of AVX-512 , DLBoost , bfloat6 are going to suffer in overhead. Pretty good chance there will be new instructions and optimizations in the future. It isn't a fixed in stone target.

 

[hipnetic]

I can’t see Apple ever going in this direction. iPadOS will just become better over time, no use forking macOS in there. macOS will remain with laptops and desktops, but I think it will become even more like iPadOS.

It's certainly possible that they won't try to squeeze OSX onto an iPad, but they're going to need to improve upon the desktop/laptop experience for the iPad now that more and more people are using it that way part of the time (which they encourage via things like the new Magic Keyboard/case and trackpad/mouse/pointer support). A 12.9" iPad Pro has a screen almost as large as a MacBook Air/Pro 13, and it actually has a *higher* resolution, but they currently don't allow a scaled "More Space" option on the iPad equivalent to what they allow MacBook users. The super-large on-screen icons and widgets are necessary/preferable when using it as a tablet, but when you dock it with a keyboard/trackpad, it would be a far better experience if you could also switch to a "More Space" mode. So, they're either going to offer that option within the iPad OS itself, or they could do it by simply allowing the device to switch to running OSX when docked. If they're already planning an OSX ARM-based laptop, it seems like it should be fairly easy for them to pre-load both iPad OS and OSX on the iPad.

 

[maflynn]

It's certainly possible that they won't try to squeeze OSX onto an iPad,

Possible? It's downright given that the iPad is never going to get macOS. Apple is making too much money with iOS/iPad.

 

[ssgbryan]

I know nothing about developing so it's quite impossible to understand.

Do you think Adobe Photoshop and Capture One Pro will work on ARM based Mac OR do they need to make a whole new version of those software just for ARM based Mac?

Based on past performance - the installers won't be ARM native until after Apple dumps any emulation software. They won't rush to port to ARM, because the potential installed base will only be folks that buy an ARM based laptop. Which will be a very, very small fraction of the laptop market.
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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.

You may not have had any pain, but a number of us did.

I was stuck on 10.6.8 until 10.10 came out. I ended up having to rework a significant portion of my workflow. It is easier to move to windows than move to ARM. And a lot cheaper to boot.

 

[cmaier]

I really like your thought process. I'm almost wondering if they won't switch to a semi-custom chip in partnership with AMD.... a hybrid laptop, perhaps? 8 AMD cores and 4 Apple Cores on the same die. The OS and Apple apps use the low-powered ARM CPU for basic... OSy things... so that the x86 Apps can run even faster without any hindrance.

No, they can‘t, because such a chip would be horrible. And an app is compile to one architecture or another, so you can’t shift a running thread back and forth between an x86 pipeline and an Arm pipeline based on its current priority (which changes. ”OSy things” sometimes need a lot of cpu power, and sometimes they don’t, just as some threads in third party apps sometimes need cpu power and sometimes don’t. That’s why iOS can shift a thread from a fast core to a slow core on-the-fly.
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Apple is not going to just alienate their user base with these processors. More likely it will be a slow transition with INTEL still supplying them chips. You can't just flip the switch without going through some transition process.

Apple‘s user base consists of a billion people running Arm processors, and maybe 75 million running Intel.

It won’t be alienated by a switch.
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Oh please. How long are we going to hear this ARM rumor.
What's more likely is that Apple is going to make iPadOS even more like MacOS up to the point we can finally call it a true Mac replacement.

That‘s also going to happen.

But so is Arm.

And it’s a good thing, because Apple can’t make Macs the machines that it wants them to be without switching to Arm. They’d probably be slowly phasing out Mac entirely if they didn’t have this Arm-based plan instead.

 

[Azrael9]

Apple‘s user base consists of a billion people running Arm processors, and maybe 75 million running Intel.

It won’t be alienated by a switch.
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That‘s also going to happen.

But so is Arm.

And it’s a good thing, because Apple can’t make Macs the machines that it wants them to be without switching to Arm. They’d probably be slowly phasing out Mac entirely if they didn’t have this Arm-based plan instead.

True.

Azrael.

 

[travelsheep]

I’d rather we move forward with technology even though it’ll be a pain in the ass for a while, all devices will be using usb-c eventually. Damn it feels nice now to only plug 1 usb-c cable to connect my mbp to an external monitor.

I do that too! Only one usb-c cable ... and a HDMI dongle... the second one now, because I lost the first one (forgot it in the house of my brother and it disappeared)

It's been 4 years since MacBook Pro lost it's ports...

 

[cmaier]

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.

“Tell me if any Playstation can run this XBOX exclusive. I know they can’t.”

See, your arguments are illogical. The fact that a particular software package is not available for a particular computer doesn’t mean that it can’t run on that computer. It means it’s not available. If Microsoft wants to port flight simulator to run on Arm, they could. And as long as the computer has a fast enough Arm chip (like, say, an A13), and fast enough graphics (lots of choices here), it can certainly run.
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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.

And you still don’t know what a computer is, huh?

Definition of computer

: one that computes

specifically : a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data