Intel CEO Responds to Rumors of ARM-Based Macs, Says Relationship With Apple Is 'Strong'

[LordVic]

Yes, it is. In that transition the PPC software was executed in an emulator (of sorts) because it could be done reasonably in that case, a separate PPC processor would have cost too much.

The ARM transition is a bit different since it's mostly about power usage. The idea is similar to ARM's big.little design but the big is Intel and the little is ARM.

The problem would be this time that Arm is in no capable way of providing enough power to emulate x86. This would mean that as of now, it would require an absolute cutover. I don't think Apple is that suicidal.

When they transitioned from PPC to intel, PPC had fallen so far behind that the Intel CPU's, even back in the Core Duo days had enough power to emulate the entirety of PPC line, and operate normally at the same time. allowing for a lengthy, but nearly transparent transition to the user.

That could not be done today if switched to Arm. Unless of course, Apple has some miracle design that even Arm hasn't announced / come up with yet, but this is highly doubtful since Apple doesn't design the Arm portion of it's CPU architecture either, but just adds its own extensions to the arm architecture

 

[BCWorld]

Yeah right# all those damn delays with Intel. I know apple can't wait to leave you.

 

[Toltepeceno]

I'm sorry for letting your bubble burst, but we are talking about Apple. 500$-700$ MBA? 300$ mac mini server?! I wish Apple would lower their prices, but this seems nearly impossible. Even an iPad Air 2 starts at 500$ and goes up to 829$. How are they going to sell products with faster processors and even more hardware parts (keyboard, trackpad etc.) for less money while keeping their profit margins up? This whole Mac ARM debate is driven by too much wishful thinking. Just recompile and everything is fine. No it's not.

Good point. An air 2 with 128 gb storage is 700.00. A macbook air with 128 gb, larger, faster and much more loaded is 899. Someone needs a reality check if they think macbook airs will sell for less than ipads, no way. If the price goes any direction it will probably be up as it will probably be even thinner.

 

[nsayer]

This would be bad news for switchers as well: no more boot camp or VMWare/Parallels unless x86 could be emulated well enough (or some sort of coprocessor solution used).

Given how seamless multi-platform fat binaries have worked out in the past, I can conceivably foresee a "netbook" like mac without the ability to run x86 binaries. Software would need to be recompiled with ARM binary support.

But I'd be hard pressed to see the market for such a thing. It impinges on the iPad on the one hand and the low end MacBooks on the other. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

[nutjob]

Where did I admit that? Not making a living at something doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about it. I simply make my living doing something else.



So latest & greatest Windows games are not "modern codebases"? They are "written by amateurs"?

Where's all of the Windows games "simply recompiled" for OS X?
Where's all of the Windows non-games "simply recompiled" for OS X?
Where all of the iOS apps "simply recompiled" for OS X?

Or are all of those developers "amateurs" using "non-modern codebases"?

You want an ARM-based Mac? Good for you. I'm not arguing against you getting what you want- just the illusion that all software can be converted almost overnight with a "simple recompile".

Why do you keep on going on about games? Games are the software most likely not to use hardware directly because they don't know what hardware they will be running on. Almost no (well written) software accesses hardware directly for this reason (unless the software is a driver). This has been the case for decades.

Then you talk about compiling software between OSes. We're not talking about transitioning between OSes or APIs (which is obviously problematic) we're talking about changing processor while keeping the software the same.

I don't know why you think I want an ARM based Mac. I'm not currently in the market for any kind of Mac. The discussion is whether Apple will make the shift, and the answer is that it's inevitable. Sorry to rain on your parade. You seem to be dead against ARMs for some reason.

You're obviously confused here, and a bit lost. I don't think I can help explain it to you (I've tried my best), you need to study up on the subject a bit.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Good to hear. All of those Macs switching to ARM rumors were rubbish anyway. Like ARM is really ready to power the CPUs used in the 27" iMacs, 15" MacBook Pros, and Mac Pros…come on people!

 

[Toltepeceno]

First of all, it will make new price point for entry level machines, let it be MBA. You will be able to get at least current-level performance for around 50% of current price, with retina screen and low-power (which means great battery life) features aswell. You loose some compatibility, for sure, but for 'power'

Do you really believe this? A 128gb ipad 2 air goes for 700.00. Do you believe they will ever sell a macbook air for less than an ipad? Do you ever believe they will ever sell a macbook air for the same price as an ipad? Bwahahahaha.

 

[GalileoSeven]

this is not the reason for it.

Intel already has chips (and more in pipeline) that are dirt cheap and offer similar price to performance that Arm in a desktop would. Apple has chosen to not go after this market and therefore doesn't bother with those chips.

if it were for a cheaper retail product, there's no reason why Apple doesn't move towards the Atom CPU's that are already out in the wild. They offer similar price, performance and power usage than the rival Arm chips, but remain within the x86 architecture.

the only reason for a shift to Arm for Apple would be pipeline control and removal of intel as a vendor. They would retain control of their chips like they do now for the ipads and iPhones. That is it.

And what was the state of Apple PC's last time they were their own architecture, incompatible with Windows and the rest of the PC world? thats right, < 2% worldwide marketshare of Personal computers and near bankruptcy in the 90's.

Exlusivity isn't the way to go here. Move to Arm would be a disaster. Intel knows that. Apple knows that. For some reason the pundits and forumers dont

This....

 

[guzhogi]

It would be hassle to switch to a different architecture again. Plus, no more ability to install Windows & Linux would make some peoples' lives harder. Add the fact that AX chips are anywhere near the performance of today's Intel's chips.

However, I would be interested in seeing what Apple could do if if iOS devices & Macs ran the same architecture. I suspect it would be easier in some cases to port software between Mac & iOS.

 

[nutjob]

The problem would be this time that Arm is in no capable way of providing enough power to emulate x86. This would mean that as of now, it would require an absolute cutover. I don't think Apple is that suicidal.

When they transitioned from PPC to intel, PPC had fallen so far behind that the Intel CPU's, even back in the Core Duo days had enough power to emulate the entirety of PPC line, and operate normally at the same time. allowing for a lengthy, but nearly transparent transition to the user.

That could not be done today if switched to Arm. Unless of course, Apple has some miracle design that even Arm hasn't announced / come up with yet, but this is highly doubtful since Apple doesn't design the Arm portion of it's CPU architecture either, but just adds its own extensions to the arm architecture

No I'm talking about two sets of processors cores (not emulation): one x86 and one ARM. If they wanted it in one chip AMD will be building combined x86/ARM processors going forward.

I agree a clean break to ARMs isn't sensible nor probable.

 

[LordVic]

It would be hassle to switch to a different architecture again. Plus, no more ability to install Windows & Linux would make some peoples' lives harder. Add the fact that AX chips are anywhere near the performance of today's Intel's chips.

However, I would be interested in seeing what Apple could do if if iOS devices & Macs ran the same architecture. I suspect it would be easier in some cases to port software between Mac & iOS.

One of the reasons for Apples incredible surge in PC sales over the last decade was the switch to Intel. Especially in the BYOD era of computing.

if suddenly Apple computers were no longer compatible with 95% of the worlds enterprise architecture and would no longer be supported by virtually every corporation due to lack of Windows / Linux capability (either via parallels or bootcamp), then Apple would lose any market for enterprise that they might currently be in.

this would happen because Apple has no real enterprise back end solutions when it comes to.. well, Enterprise. its a realm they've stayed far away from. Especially since they canned the xserves.

thats why I dont get at all why this rumour keeps popping up every 6 months or so. for apple it makes absolutely Zero sense at all. none. it would be a financial noose.

----------

No I'm talking about two sets of processors cores (not emulation): one x86 and one ARM. If they wanted it in one chip AMD will be building combined x86/ARM processors going forward.

I agree a clean break to ARMs isn't sensible nor probable.

while AMD is doing an Arm core in their CPU's, it's not being done in a way that can be used as such. It's more an attempt to bring about a certain low power security and performance metric. It's not going to be "either or". it will be "x86, that borrows some arm routines". and I believe is being aimed more at parallel server workloads. details are a bit sketchy (unless they've done a better announcement since). and isn't likely to be seen till 2016

 

[iSee]

...

Games tend to be the ultimate test though. If all software can be "simply recompiled" why isn't every game available on Windows available on Macs? Why isn't the superior non-game programs available on Windows available on Macs? If it's just "simple recompile", all those companies are potentially losing out on lots of Mac revenue because they can't be bothered to do a "simple recompile"? Do you think they DON'T want OUR money?

Why don't all the developers who have built iOS software do a "simple recompile" so they can also make those "millions" of apps available on OS X too? iOS and OS X share much of the same underpinnings so it should be even easier to do this. Where's those millions of apps available in the OS X store after a "simple recompile"? Do you think they DON'T want OUR money?
...

Games often use APIs that aren't available on OS X (not as a 100% or anywhere near 100% compatible drop in). E.g., DirectX. Likewise between iOS and OS X. Obviously, in that case, the UI of the app needs to be designed differently.

However, in a switch from x64 to ARM Apple would presumably/hopefully make all its existing APIs available with a very high level of compatibility (and with good documentation on the differences). That's what will make the process of porting apps from one architecture to another relatively easy.

This is quite possible. You may not have noticed, but iOS runs on three different types of CPUs and, indeed, apps these days are typically compiled for all three and you really wouldn't notice the difference.

So, the examples you bring up are real, but don't need to apply in this case.

 

[AustinIllini]

ARM doesn't have x86-64 instruction set supporting CPUs.
Only Intel and AMD have those.

1) So if Apple brings out a MBA with an ARM CPU, it will be just an overpriced competitor to Google's Chromebook.
Not a good idea.

2) Count in that AMD went from a real Intel contenderwith their Athlon series CPUs to a "niche" player after Intel introduced their i-series CPUs, so ²even if Apple switches to AMD, they will be running behind in the CPU market. Not a good idea.

3) Apple is itself a niche-player with their Intel/OSX Macs compared to the vast majority of Intel/Windows computers in the world. Corporate world and the majority of home systems are Wintels, that's something you can't deny.

4) Yet, just because Apple went Intel a few years ago, a lot more of the Wintel based software gets overported to Intel/OSX than in the past when Apple was still running on Motorola's PPC CPUs.


5) And not only the Wintel software, but also a lot of the Lintel sofware (Intel/Linux) becomes easier to overport, due to the the x86-64 instruction set and the FreeBSD origin of OSX.

6) For some software there isn't even today a Mac-version or Mac-software that can do the same that is an industry standard, so being Windows compliant is a benefit.

7) Other software is an industry standard (MS Office comes to mind), but would Microsoft create an ARM-based specially for Apple if Apple minimizes its market-share by switching to ARM? Now they do that because it's profitable, iOS is big and Intel/OSX is profitable, but an ARM switch would decimate their Mac customer market, which would reduce also their iOS market (they are connected) and that could have the affect that it won't be really profitable for MS to create an ARM version for OSX and iOS, which would further push Apple into the niche market.
The industry isn't going to make iWork the standard at all.


If Apple wants to keep it's Mac line (iMac, MBA and MBP) and with "keep", I mean "having a computer line at all" instead of becoming again just as small at the time of their PPC days, they will not switch to ARM or even to AMD.

Fantastic post. Agreed 100%

 

[Marx55]

True full x86 compatibility is a must. And that means Intel. Full stop.

 

[thekev]

ARM Macs better come soon because we need cheaper MacBook Airs that are around $500-$700. Broadwell-U CPUs from Intel are around $250-$400, and that's not going to cut it for a $500 Macbook Air price point. The CPUs need to be around $50-$100 to hit that price. We could also use a $300 Mac Mini as a small office server, in which an ARM cpu would work well.

intel should be scared. Apple is already at speed parity for the low-end CPUs, and by the time the A10x rolls around, they'll be as fast as Intel's top CPUs.

Apple's ARM A8x cpus are as in the same ballpark speeds as any 10-watt Broadwell CPU. And, given a higher power budget, they could easily go 2-3x faster, putting them in ludicrous speeds. A fully configured 10-core version for a Mac Mini server could even be 10x faster, and wouldn't cost any more than the A8x if they took out the GPU.

Just ship ARM, and have all the vendors just recompile their OS X apps for ARM. No one needs Windows compatibility (I don't know any Mac owner that uses Windows) and the .25% of Mac users that do can go buy an Intel Mac.

Your numbers are off. For the Air they're around $200-300 sold in batches of 1000. This is a significant percentage of the selling price, but I suspect Apple gets a deal on these due to volume. The reason is that if you look at their low end imac, it adopted a notebook chip, which would typically be more expensive. Apart from that if you look at their typical markups, you would most likely shave the Air down to $700-800 depending on where their overall cost lies relative to desired margins, not $500. This assume that other factors remain consistent along their entry models. The concept of a $300 mini is something that is extremely unlikely.

They had a $400 mini at the beginning using a G4 processor. The price bumps didn't really come about solely due to increases. They dropped some of the low end configurations. This round was a little different. CPU cost went up on sharply on the 13" macbook pros using intel's generic numbers, which the mini typically adopts. It didn't go up much on the quad core cpus, but Apple elected not to use them anyway.

 

[nutjob]

One of the reasons for Apples incredible surge in PC sales over the last decade was the switch to Intel. Especially in the BYOD era of computing.

if suddenly Apple computers were no longer compatible with 95% of the worlds enterprise architecture and would no longer be supported by virtually every corporation due to lack of Windows / Linux capability (either via parallels or bootcamp), then Apple would lose any market for enterprise that they might currently be in.

this would happen because Apple has no real enterprise back end solutions when it comes to.. well, Enterprise. its a realm they've stayed far away from. Especially since they canned the xserves.

thats why I dont get at all why this rumour keeps popping up every 6 months or so. for apple it makes absolutely Zero sense at all. none. it would be a financial noose.

----------



while AMD is doing an Arm core in their CPU's, it's not being done in a way that can be used as such. It's more an attempt to bring about a certain low power security and performance metric. It's not going to be "either or". it will be "x86, that borrows some arm routines". and I believe is being aimed more at parallel server workloads. details are a bit sketchy (unless they've done a better announcement since). and isn't likely to be seen till 2016

From : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...d-arm-chip-architectures-in-project-skybridge

AMD WILL UNITE 64-bit x86 and ARM architectures in its chips next year while bringing on board support for Android in a development effort dubbed "Project Skybridge".

There's two kinds of cores on the motherboard, how code is run on each is up to the OS. Maybe you're getting confused with HSA, which is a somewhat different strategy. But the full cores are there and there is nothing stopping it being used to support the two architectures fully.

 

[LordVic]

Games often use APIs that aren't available on OS X (not as a 100% or anywhere near 100% compatible drop in). E.g., DirectX. Likewise between iOS and OS X. Obviously, in that case, the UI of the app needs to be designed differently.

However, in a switch from x64 to ARM Apple would presumably/hopefully make all its existing APIs available with a very high level of compatibility (and with good documentation on the differences). That's what will make the process of porting apps from one architecture to another relatively easy.

This is quite possible. You may not have noticed, but iOS runs on three different types of CPUs and, indeed, apps these days are typically compiled for all three and you really wouldn't notice the difference.

So, the examples you bring up are real, but don't need to apply in this case.

what are the 3 different "Types of CPU's" That iOS runs on? Last i checked, iOS runs on Arm, Arm and Arm.

they run on different Apple versions of Arm's implementation with their own custom extension sets. But the very core of the Apple Ax design is still the Arm CPU. Which is currently the only hardware platform driving iOS.

Which makes the move from one apple device to the next much simpler than you make it out to be (or would be from Arm to x86).

If Apple did move to Arm and wanted to maintain the acceptance it has today it would need to completely re-write the API's used by x86 developers.

if you were a Dev, would you honestly spend the time, money and resources developing a game for example, to use an exclusive API set just to hit roughly a miniscule subset of the gaming audience?

The only reason right now that gaming even came to Apple and Linux is due to OpenGL or emulation. And ARM in no way has enough power to emulate x86 with any real performance

as is, Gaming on Apple is already hindered and often sees performance degredation to that of similar powered Windows devices.

 

[AlecZ]

Oh, great... you have info on the performance of whatever ARM chip they would put in there..... can i please have the link?? :roll eyes:

There's no way whatever they'd put in would be faster than a contemporary Intel i5 or i7. These are mobile processors you're talking about.

 

[LordVic]

Your numbers are off. For the Air they're around $200-300 sold in batches of 1000. This is a significant percentage of the selling price, but I suspect Apple gets a deal on these due to volume. The reason is that if you look at their low end imac, it adopted a notebook chip, which would typically be more expensive. Apart from that if you look at their typical markups, you would most likely shave the Air down to $700-800 depending on where their overall cost lies relative to desired margins, not $500. This assume that other factors remain consistent along their entry models. The concept of a $300 mini is something that is extremely unlikely.

They had a $400 mini at the beginning using a G4 processor. The price bumps didn't really come about solely due to increases. They dropped some of the low end configurations. This round was a little different. CPU cost went up on sharply on the 13" macbook pros using intel's generic numbers, which the mini typically adopts. It didn't go up much on the quad core cpus, but Apple elected not to use them anyway.

Intel is also doing US no favours by their CPU choices in all their hardware. The Mac Airs are excused for their CPU choice due to power and heat restrictions.

But in the new Mac Mini, and even the lowest end the newer lowest end iMac, intel has decided to use the ULV intel part. The ULV (ultra low voltage) components typically cost more for each watt of performance than the similarly priced Low Voltage (LV) and standard CPU.

this is mostly noticable in latest mac Mini iteration where they opted to use the same intel ULV chip as the Mac Mini at 17w than the previous quad core 25w part, or even the larger faster quade core desktop 85w part. for that same $200, intel could be providing i3/i5 quadcores at 3.0ghz or faster.

Apple could easily provide cheaper products that give better performance than some of their newest ones, but are opting not too, likely in order to maximize profits by reducing the diversity of their internal components and build requirements.

----------

From : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...d-arm-chip-architectures-in-project-skybridge



There's two kinds of cores on the motherboard, how code is run on each is up to the OS. Maybe you're getting confused with HSA, which is a somewhat different strategy. But the full cores are there and there is nothing stopping it being used to support the two architectures fully.

thank you for the afternoon reading. sounds like I missed what AMD is currently working on (they've been mostly irrelevant in the desktop space for a bit now)

 

[kemal]

OS X on ARM

You know OS X could run just fine on ARM if you don't mind your single core performance being about that of an Ivy Bridge core I3. This way Apple can ensure they go back to the good'ol days of nearly always having slower machines than the Windows world.

 

[LordVic]

You know OS X could run just fine on ARM if you don't mind your single core performance being about that of an Ivy Bridge core I3. This way Apple can ensure they go back to the good'ol days of nearly always having slower machines than the Windows world.

But why do that? when intel offers chips that can already do that at the same cost as the Arm chips. Even AMD has the same.

The move to Arm would be for pipeline control. and pipeline control only.

 

[b34g]

No, I just want my Mac to NOT run on a slow ARM processor. What "progress"?! If anything, Apple will put them only on netbooks. Edit: And I also want Wine and my FreeBSD and Debian virtual machines to work.

Wine still worked with PPC, with Qemu. Also, VMs will still work for those OSs. Xen and KVM, for instance, have already been ported to ARM. If you work with 'free software', then you have the least to worry about. Go look at the Debian ports. Already most of the open-source software out there has been compiled for ARM, even chromium works on ARM and has worked on the raspberry pi for a long time, for instance. So, you'll be able to use all the open-source software you want.

 

[Keirasplace]

I hope you realize it isn't as simple as Adobe running gcc Photoshop.c Photoshop. Most, if not EVERY app uses a host of different open source libraries that will have to be recompiled to support ARM instruction sets. Some of these vendors use thousands of such libraries. OSX itself uses a lot of these libraries. There may be some that are easily recompilable, sure. But there are others that perhaps they depend on, and some those depend on further (and so on) that need to be rewritten perhaps.

This is a transition that'll only happen when there's a completely new product in the works.

Oh, come on, I bet, right now, they've got OSX internally going on the A8X.

Seriously, your overstating the problem here by a lot (and I've got the 30 years in this business to say so).

The key here is what do the users really do with their machine (Use Case) and what user doesn't need native X86 compatibility. I'm betting, the number that have little use for it is much larger than you think.

10 years ago, you'd have a major point... But not now.

 

[joema2]

...
Where's all of the Windows games "simply recompiled" for OS X?
Where's all of the Windows non-games "simply recompiled" for OS X?
Where all of the iOS apps "simply recompiled" for OS X?...

Rest assured you are exactly right, for the reasons you state and a lot more. Proof of this is Apple's own PPC to x86 transition. The software ecosystem consists of a lot more than a few mainstream apps. It took *years* before all the PPC apps and utilities that customers relied on were ported.

No computer company in history with a significant base of binary-compatible software has ever changed to non-compatible CPU easily or overnight.

However history is littered with failed attempts where they *thought* it would be easy -- "just recompile". A notable example was the FHP computer documented in Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Soul of a New Machine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

For a time Microsoft supported Windows NT and various apps on three different CPU architectures: x86, MIPS and DEC Alpha. It was only possible to port a small number of internal apps and even that was a huge job. And that was using a code base specifically optimized for porting.

A more recent example is Intel's own Itanium CPU. A key reason it failed was apps could not just be recompiled.

Even more recently, a key reason Microsoft's Windows RT tablets failed is due to binary incompatibility with x86, which in turn limited available apps. If it was as simple as "just recompile", WinRT tablets would have had every possible app from day 1.

So there's a lot more involved than "just recompile".

With software that is not locked into a specific CPU instruction set -- e.g, Google apps like Gmail, Sheets, Docs, etc, of course you can change CPUs but this software is only a small % of the overall desktop and laptop marketplace.

 

[b34g]

You obviously don't develop software for a living. It is essentially a recompile. Any modern codebase that isn't written by amateurs is the same.

You also don't seem to understand how Apple would go about supporting ARM processors: just add them to an existing x86 design. Since ARMs use much less power than the bloated Intel architecture, software that runs on the ARM will use less power, while legacy code will run on the x86. People will be incentivised to use ARM software because of improved battery life.

This. You can look at the Debian ports, even. Already, most open-source software written in c++/c already runs on ARM and other architectures. If a certain codebase, features intel-specific compilation, or x86 asm is used, it's on the responsibility of the developer for doing that.