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Intel Chips Have Memory Access Design Flaw and Fix Could Lead to Performance Drop

oldmacs said:
Yeah let’s make it into a personal argument. I’m typing on an iPhone with two bandaided sliced fingers and a thumb, so my typing ablity isn’t exactly great.





Both terrible examples proving my point. PPC Macs sold into 2006 and got a rubbish 3 years of software support and immediate releases of software that was incompatible. Not interested in going there and doing that again. 68k Macs were also abandoned in about the same amount of time.



A complete loss of software compatibility makes the Mac into a giant iPhone.

Apple have zero experience in making desktop class processors, how exactly are they going to be magically better at it than intel? Complaining about intel’s stagnation is a complete joke. Apple are one of the laziest companies out there, they don’t bother updating macs even when there are updated chips available, so saying that Intel stagnation is a reason for a platform shift is a joke.

Developers are not going to flock to write new software, we’d all have to deal with crap stopover emulation, on underpowered Arm chips. Going to arm looses software compatibility. Gaining access to touch optimised iOS apps is not a benefit that would outweigh the loss of software compatibility. They could achieve the same through arm co processors anyway.
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Apple’s chip designers have MANY years experience designing desktop processors. Where do you think they came from?

And developers will target Mac when they can do so from a single Xcode project that targets iPad, iPhone and macOS.
 
cmaier said:
Apple’s chip designers have MANY years experience designing desktop processors. Where do you think they came from?

And developers will target Mac when they can do so from a single Xcode project that targets iPad, iPhone and macOS.
Click to expand...

So where are those years of desktop processors they’ve designed and implemented in Macs?

And yeah my point, the same scaled down apps we get on iOS devices. Brilliant. The dumbing down continues.
 
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DevNull0 said:
So when Apple has one screw up it's time to go to Android and Windows?

One buggy iOS release; or one hardware flaw and we should all flee Apple?

I didn't think so. The bias of some people is just astounding.
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Can't read? The message was saying APPLE should go with AMD/ARM products, not customers.

Try reading next time.
 
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oldmacs said:
So where are those years of desktop processors they’ve designed and implemented in Macs?

And yeah my point, the same scaled down apps we get on iOS devices. Brilliant. The dumbing down continues.
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Apple’s chip designers include, for example, the Intrinsity folks (who were formerly EVSX which emerged from the death of exponential). I worked with them at exponential. We designed the PowerPC x704. For macs.

They also include folks from DEC who worked on Alphas, from AMD who worked on opteron, etc. I know many of them, and they are far more talented than the folks at intel who haven’t managed to double chip performance in a decade.

And just because an Xcode project targets iPhone and Mac doesn’t mean the functionality is the same on both. That’s not at all how it works.
 
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bladerunner2000 said:
ARM? LOL... yeah good luck doing anything with that pathetic processor. Im sure video editors, 3d animators, etc will jump at that.
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80W4j2P.png

Sorry, what were you saying?
 
cmaier said:
And just because an Xcode project targets iPhone and Mac doesn’t mean the functionality is the same on both. That’s not at all how it works.
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Obviously not but you are going to end up with the same dumbing down that iOS apps have over their Mac OS versions due to the nature of iOS.
 
oldmacs said:
Obviously not but you are going to end up with the same dumbing down that iOS apps have over their Mac OS versions due to the nature of iOS.
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What do you mean “due to the nature of iOS?”

There’s no reason that Mac can’t have more powerful “kits” than iOS.
 
cmaier said:
They also include folks from DEC who worked on Alphas, from AMD who worked on opteron, etc. I know many of them, and they are far more talented than the folks at intel who haven’t managed to double chip performance in a decade
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And again where are those Apple designed processors that overcome all of intels supposed issues? (And still suck because you've got the overhead of emulating everything).
 
oldmacs said:
And again where are those Apple designed processors that overcome all of intels supposed issues? (And still suck because you've got the overhead of emulating everything).
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They are doubtless running in a lab in Cupertino as we speak. Your argument seems to be “Apple hasn’t sold a product yet with processor X so they can’t do it.”

Just like when Everyone said Apple couldn’t do a phone, and Apple couldn’t do a mobile processor, and Apple couldn’t do a watch.

They have tons of senior engineers who have designed top of class desktop processors, none of which suffer from this intel bug. They’ve shown that their design skills are superior to the competition by eking out significantly higher speed than the competition in the mobile space. They have even designed processors FOR MACS.

You are also wrong about “emulating everything.” Most instructions executed by the cpu are from the OS. The OS will be native. A small percentage of the code would have to be recompiled or emulated.
 
chucker23n1 said:
Where are you getting the idea that Apple will make more reliable CPUs? It took a decade to discover this bug. Literally billions didn’t discover it. There’s nowhere near enough data or experience to say Apple will miraculously be better on this front.
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This is right. This is not about a brand (although I don't trust Intel I think they are a suspect company anyway), but about placing trust in overly complex systems, black boxes etc. Foolish and not surprising to discover big security holes. If their TPM and similar technologies did not already give the hint of just how potentially vulnerable the systems are, this really should! Far too closed, far too opaque. Apple, Intel, MS, all of them are bad choices for mission critical stuff where information security is needed.
 
oldmacs said:
iOS is locked down and limited compared to MacOS. Designing software to run on both is going to mean limiting the said software to limitations of iOs.
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That’s just crazy. Right now, as we speak, developers target Apple Watch and iPad in the same Xcode project. Yet iPad seems to do a lot more with its apps than Apple Watch. You don’t run the same software on both. You share code but target each platform individually in the same project. You keep writing these conclusions without any evidence or even logical support.
 
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oldmacs said:
iOS is locked down and limited compared to MacOS. Designing software to run on both is going to mean limiting the said software to limitations of iOs.
Click to expand...

iOS is locked down, to keep consumers more secure, but not limited. Ask the advanced jailbreak coders, who run full Linux command-line apps and server code, stuff even more complicated to use than typical Mac apps, on their jailbroken iOS devices. iOS has no intrinsic limitations that would prevent a macOS shell to run on top of it, instead of Cocoa Touch. Or possibly even a Linux VM.
 
oldmacs said:
Yeah let’s make it into a personal argument. I’m typing on an iPhone with two bandaided sliced fingers and a thumb, so my typing ablity isn’t exactly great.





Both terrible examples proving my point. PPC Macs sold into 2006 and got a rubbish 3 years of software support and immediate releases of software that was incompatible. Not interested in going there and doing that again. 68k Macs were also abandoned in about the same amount of time.



A complete loss of software compatibility makes the Mac into a giant iPhone.

Apple have zero experience in making desktop class processors, how exactly are they going to be magically better at it than intel? Complaining about intel’s stagnation is a complete joke. Apple are one of the laziest companies out there, they don’t bother updating macs even when there are updated chips available, so saying that Intel stagnation is a reason for a platform shift is a joke.

Developers are not going to flock to write new software, we’d all have to deal with crap stopover emulation, on underpowered Arm chips. Going to arm looses software compatibility. Gaining access to touch optimised iOS apps is not a benefit that would outweigh the loss of software compatibility. They could achieve the same through arm co processors anyway.
Click to expand...

Depending on the direction the new Mac Pro goes, I'm thinking of just migrating to a hpc Ubuntu machine. With VMWare Workstation it would be able to run Windows (and Mac OS with patch). Or If I need Windows at full speed just boot directly into it.
 
oldmacs said:
Apple have zero experience in making desktop class processors...
Click to expand...

Apple was a founder of the PowerPC consortium, which for a period was making faster desktop processors than Intel. In fact, the current IBM Power mainframe still appears to be faster than any Intel server.
 
cmaier said:
They are doubtless running in a lab in Cupertino as we speak. Your argument seems to be “Apple hasn’t sold a product yet with processor X so they can’t do it.”

Just like when Everyone said Apple couldn’t do a phone, and Apple couldn’t do a mobile processor, and Apple couldn’t do a watch.

They have tons of senior engineers who have designed top of class desktop processors, none of which suffer from this intel bug. They’ve shown that their design skills are superior to the competition by eking out significantly higher speed than the competition in the mobile space. They have even designed processors FOR MACS.

You are also wrong about “emulating everything.” Most instructions executed by the cpu are from the OS. The OS will be native. A small percentage of the code would have to be recompiled or emulated.
Click to expand...

When did everyone say that Apple couldn't do a phone? It was a foregone conclusion based on their great success with the iPod.
 
Everything we are using right now which we think is secure, actually, if studied with enough time and eyeballs, will prove to not be as such. There is a vulnerability at every level just waiting to be found and exploited. That will never change. This however is a big one.
 
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jinnj said:
So much open source software is not available for ARM that MacOS will suffer.
Click to expand...

You've got to be kidding. I can build and run pretty much the same open source applications on my Raspberry Pi 3 (ARM) as I can on a high-end enterprise-class AWS server instance (Intel).
 
 
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And the iMac Pro, just became an iMac.

But in all serious, I wonder if Apple can use one of there ARM based SoC chips to off load the software fix at the kernel to patch this without the intel CPU taking a performance hit? I mean Apple is already using these SoC chips in MacBook Pro’s.
 
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