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Intel Announces 11th-Generation Tiger Lake Chips as Apple Plans Transition to Arm-Based Apple Silicon
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This is a CPU appropriate for the Air or 13-inch Pro. Intel staggers releases; you never get the entire gradient of power/performance classes upgraded at the same time (or even in the same year).
A newer CPU for the iMac is planned for this winter.
Is that why Intel listed them alongside their other partners for this chip this year? Oh wait...
To be fair, they never list them, which doesn’t prevent Apple from using their CPUs.
It is also possible that Intel will be refusing Apple access to Tiger Lake out of spite, even though that would be a dumb thing to do from business perspective.
I’d say it all depends on yields. If Intel only manages to produce a handful of these CPUs, we will only see them in a small sample of premium laptops. Let’s not forget that Apple is a behemoth when it comes to premium market - they need more high-end CPUs than anyone else.
Sure.
My post was in response to worries that not even MS Office or CC will be there.
AMD has a Fortran compiler, and GNU's also runs on ARM already. I can't comment on how good they are compared to Intel's.
Matlab does indeed not seem to have ARM64 builds yet, but there are mentions of NDAs, so it's probably in the works.
Given that Apple explicitly made a slide touting that they've already helped port various OSS Projects, I don't see the logic in the above statement.
And if they wanted to lock down the Mac like that, they don't need to switch archs to do so.
Yup. Intel rarely mentions Apple (probably because Apple doesn't really want them to; they want to control their own narrative).
Yeah, I don't see it, what with Apple apparently having gotten various exclusive Ice Lake parts (the ones prefixed 'N'). Intel is happy to have the business.
Will there be any Mac with Tiger Like-UP3 (née -U) or -UP4 (née -Y)? Maybe. Heck, Apple could do a hybrid approach where they do move the Air and 13-inch Pro to Apple Silicon in the next revision, but also explicitly do one more 13-inch Pro model with Intel on it, to serve special customer demands. (They're more likely to do that on the 16-inch, though.)
R already runs on ARM64 on Linux, so yes, it'll almost certainly run on ARM Macs early on.
State, I don't know.
The version of Office on ARM might lack some old arch-specific things. I'm not sure they'll have Visual Basic for Applications on day one, for example.
It won't have this CPU, because it wants something beefier.
It also won't have the 10th-gen, because at this point, it seems unlikely Apple will bother with Comet Lake-H, because it's been out for half a year and was barely a mentionable upgrade.
I think we'll see (one last?) 16-inch Pro in early 2021 with Rocket Lake-H.
Given that R runs on the iPad, I don't think it's going to be a problem. Give it maybe half a year or so for testing however.
We learn to take what MR articles with many grains of salt. Always good to get them clarified by people who actually know what they are talking about. That's why I asked again. And I got an answer.
Thanks to those who ahswered the question.
PS. Your sarcasm is noted.
Would we even see this considering ASi. Intel could be staggering the releases just in time with the ASi iMac releases.
Given that Apple just upgraded the iMac, there might not be any more Intel iMacs, no.
That's always something where conspiracy theories fail. "They will do A, B and C to achieve X". "They don't need A, B and C to achieve X". But recognising that requires logical thought. "They will switch to ARM to lock down the Mac". "They don't need to switch to ARM to lock down the Mac". "They will develop a vaccine and use it to inject us all with microchips". "If there was a microchip small enough to be injected, which doesn't exist, you wouldn't need to put it into a vaccine".
Keep in mind that PS5 and Xbox aren't trying to, and can't possibly, compete with a full price gaming PC, the price difference is massive. Their market is to make a gaming machine that is priced for mass consumption, but is highly optimised for gaming, and thus best gaming bang for buck in a targeted price bracket. No, they are not even close to trying to be the best gaming platform, they are trying to be an affordable specialised gaming platform. The graphics cards you're talking about cost more than a PS4 alone, without adding the PC they go into. So with that reality in mind, PS and Xbox perform remarkably well. To keep it in perspective, the PS4 doesn't even have an SSD (I presume Xbox is the same), simply to keep the cost down, but the performance-cost of that is that you have to wait for games to "load" e.g. the battle bus and free falling time in Fortnight. PS5 is coming with a smallish SSD, which will have a huge impact on removing this load time.
"I'm not upgrading my iOS to the new version with contact tracing because they're trying to track me" (but how do you know they aren't already?)
The switch to ARM is a massive mistake for Apple, it'll mean even more professionals switch to Windows. I cannot see the logic in it other than wanting to lock down their Desktop OS like IOS, and trying to bring in the casual audience that buys their phones. I think it'll be their biggest blunder yet :/ Plus it'll take 5 years to get all the support you want like it did with the iPad... even then the iPad isn't sufficient to replace a Laptop.
I know I wont invest in another Mac now knowing x86 for them is dead, it would be a major waste of money. I built a new Windows PC for the first time in many years, I've made the switch now. I'm still using this iMac I'm on, but that is going on eBay as soon as I get my new monitor as the one I've been using sucks.
I know I wont invest in another Mac now knowing x86 for them is dead, it would be a major waste of money. I built a new Windows PC for the first time in many years, I've made the switch now. I'm still using this iMac I'm on, but that is going on eBay as soon as I get my new monitor as the one I've been using sucks.
It wont be better though, it might be more power efficient, but not more powerful. I mean they skimp on the hardware as it is :/ You have to pay through the roof to spec it up, even then you can build yourself something much better on Windows. With the likes of Nvidia bypassing the CPU to unload what they want on the GPU.... gonna be crazy for encoding and crap that has been throttled by the CPU.
Meanwhile Apple move in house, and their GPU on the mobile side has never been anything special.
Ok, first I make my living developing software since... well, quite likely before you were born.
Second, I did the transition from 68k to PowerPC, then the transition from PowerPC to Intel, and guess what: There is no transition from Intel to ARM. Every bit of code in any higher level language behaves exactly the same on Intel and ARM. No byte ordering problems, no different floating point formats, no alignment problems, vector instructions just compile.
Third: Please, do yourself a favour and don't try to describe RISC to me or anyone else. All Intel processors in the last 20 years are RISC processors with a horrible kludge of an instruction decoder attached to the front.
Fourth: Please, do yourself a favour and don't make guesses at performance. I _measured_ it. Same code on an iPhone X and on a quad core iMac, using all available cores, running significantly faster on the iPhone X with only two fast cores.
"Performance sensitive applications will need to be tweaked". That is done on a high level, independent of the processor. If an application needs "tweaking", it is already tweaked.
Here's something you could look up on the internet: Apple's ARM microarchitecture. What counts is: How many instructions can be decoded per cycle, how many can be dispatched, how many can be retired. Apple's ARM implementation beats the **** out of everything Intel produces where it counts. Plus massively bigger caches.
Maybe he's right - it would seem awfully shortsighted for them to not just change CPU but also GPU at the same time. I'm already cynical they can build anything like that iMac Pro or Mac Pro replacements in 2 years time with ARM chips, let alone the level of graphics crunching power those devices need too.
Big Sur for devs probably has everything ripped out of it so they can't find out what's happening and only what they need to work at the most basic level, but I guess we'll see.
A sizeable amount of apps will just require a recompile. It's what it took from PowerPC to Intel, and it's what it'll take from Intel to ARM.
This is possible for arch-specific code. But it's not 1992. Apps that use arch-specific optimizations are rare rather than the norm. Compilers have gotten far better at this job, and libraries like Accelerate.framework exist to take advantage of arch-specific extensions like SSE vs. NEON.
It almost certainly won't "run very slow". And when it does, that'll only be in code that was highly optimized for an arch, which, again, is rare nowadays.
I… what?
That's my whole point. Intel released this just after the new intel Mac knowing that Apple will be on ASi before they release the heavier versions of 11th gen. So Apple will be comparing ASi to the previous iMac (10th gen) whereas intel will be comparing ASi to their new (yet to be released) 11th gen heavier cpus.