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Intel Expecting Apple to Transition to Custom ARM-Based Chips Starting in 2020
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Errr...
Why on Gods green earth do you assume that ARM macs won’t support PCIe?
There is no reason to assume that they won’t support discrete graphics cards to same extent as they do today. And every reason to assume that they will feature nicely performant GPUs built-in if Apple so desires, the GPU integrated into the A12x performs very well indeed given the constraints in die size and power.
Macs have already changed from 68k to PPC to x86, and the ground is way better prepared for a transition today.
And they will be able to tailor their processors (and total system architecture, no longer tied to intel lagging in support for low power/large volume memory for instance) to suit them. And to suit us, because Apple actually want to sell us systems so that we’ll be hooked into their eco system of hardware and services.
I’ve been through all the previous transitions and I just can’t see any reason for panic.
This should keep informed buyers from buying a new Intel-Mac this coming year. Intel Macs with suffer the same faith as PowerPC-Macs. First: We will continue to support Intel for the foreseeable future. Then: App adoption on ARM reaches critical mass, official apps discontinue Intel-support. It's a great way to get customers to update their Macs in a market saturated with "Perfectly fine" Macs, withholding users from upgrading the last 10 years...
Right, and the Mac had standard PCI and AGP slots just like a PC during the later part of the PPC days, even had AMD and Nvidia cards. Don’t see why this would have to be any different.
I've already transitioned away from Macs for many reasons. This was in the back of my mind as I do think its a step in the wrong direction. Just my opinion, and my work needs are such that an intel based computer is a requirement.
I can smell the Itanium all over again. It didn't really work out now did it? Developers want to work natively on the platform that they develop for. Just look at current and future generation gaming consoles (the PS4 has almost sold 100 million units, so it's quite a much bigger market than macbooks) - they all transitioned to x86 architectures, based on AMD APU's (Jaguar current, Zen future).
Why did they do that?
1. To lower prices.
2. To make development much easier, efficient, and easier to optimize for, as creating an x86 based devkit is a lot easier and cheaper. Exisiting HW can also be utilized.
3. Future proofing in regards to x86 being the by far biggest and dominant system architecture for a long, long time still.
4. Less costs in R&D and fabrication because x86 is such an established architecture.
5. Increase performance versus custom based PPC/Cell architectures that are rarely updated, and sees far less R&D than x86 across the board.
6. Choice of multiple vendors (Intel, AMD, etc). PPC has usually been locked in to one vendor.
AMD has so far sold around 150 million x86 APU's in current generation gaming consoles. All of them use x86-64, and will in future generations as well.
Intel has dumped Itanium support. Mostly all of HP PA-RISC, SPARC, MIPS, IBM Power and DEC Alpha RISC architectures are dead. IBM is continuing to support the Power architecture because of the large corporate/financial install base, but that's it. Why? Because x86 won over all of them.
The time of x86 is the biggest that it's currently been. It's used as the de-facto standard in ALL computers. In gaming consoles (PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox, Xbox One X). In mostly ALL servers, wether large or small. x86 is completely dominant in cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform). And when x86 is at its peak, Apple wants to transition to a RISC architecture for its computers? That doesn't make any sense at all. Developers WANTS to develop on the platform that they are developing for. An extremely small percent of developers target macOS. And less and less developers target IOS these days. It's all about trying to create cross-platform compatibility, because nobody wants to have separate code bases for many different platforms.
I fear a lot of developers would not jump on to the customized ARM architecture that would be completely exclusive to Apple. Apple would never license it to anyone else, which means the market would be very small. Mac's and macOS are currently being used to develop for cross-platform compatibility, all based on x86. That would be very difficult on an ARM based machine. And it would be exclusive to MacBooks only. Apple's professional market would take a big hit. Only designers and graphical artists would remain on the platform.
Why did they do that?
1. To lower prices.
2. To make development much easier, efficient, and easier to optimize for, as creating an x86 based devkit is a lot easier and cheaper. Exisiting HW can also be utilized.
3. Future proofing in regards to x86 being the by far biggest and dominant system architecture for a long, long time still.
4. Less costs in R&D and fabrication because x86 is such an established architecture.
5. Increase performance versus custom based PPC/Cell architectures that are rarely updated, and sees far less R&D than x86 across the board.
6. Choice of multiple vendors (Intel, AMD, etc). PPC has usually been locked in to one vendor.
AMD has so far sold around 150 million x86 APU's in current generation gaming consoles. All of them use x86-64, and will in future generations as well.
Intel has dumped Itanium support. Mostly all of HP PA-RISC, SPARC, MIPS, IBM Power and DEC Alpha RISC architectures are dead. IBM is continuing to support the Power architecture because of the large corporate/financial install base, but that's it. Why? Because x86 won over all of them.
The time of x86 is the biggest that it's currently been. It's used as the de-facto standard in ALL computers. In gaming consoles (PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox, Xbox One X). In mostly ALL servers, wether large or small. x86 is completely dominant in cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform). And when x86 is at its peak, Apple wants to transition to a RISC architecture for its computers? That doesn't make any sense at all. Developers WANTS to develop on the platform that they are developing for. An extremely small percent of developers target macOS. And less and less developers target IOS these days. It's all about trying to create cross-platform compatibility, because nobody wants to have separate code bases for many different platforms.
I fear a lot of developers would not jump on to the customized ARM architecture that would be completely exclusive to Apple. Apple would never license it to anyone else, which means the market would be very small. Mac's and macOS are currently being used to develop for cross-platform compatibility, all based on x86. That would be very difficult on an ARM based machine. And it would be exclusive to MacBooks only. Apple's professional market would take a big hit. Only designers and graphical artists would remain on the platform.
All I can say is it will halt the hackintosh crowd; Perhaps Apple is tired of being embarrassed by hackintoshers making systems for a fraction of the price that outperform the real thing.
(although I doubt Apple cares about the hackintosh scene, if they did they would have already found a way to shut it down)
Another point that needs to be addressed is that if Adobe CC is not available as a native app immediately at launch, my guess is that Apple will lose 100% of the creative market over night.
Without any native heavy use apps, this plan is dead on arrival. Just my 2¢
(although I doubt Apple cares about the hackintosh scene, if they did they would have already found a way to shut it down)
Another point that needs to be addressed is that if Adobe CC is not available as a native app immediately at launch, my guess is that Apple will lose 100% of the creative market over night.
Without any native heavy use apps, this plan is dead on arrival. Just my 2¢
I know I’m jumping into a conversation, but I want to clarify something. Apple’s number is all iOS devices not just iPhones. For people like me that means an iPhone and at least one iPad for the same person. So I would guess more like 600 million users. And btw it’s 100 million Mac users. I also think it will be a hard sell to convince people who only have an iPhone or iPad to buy a Mac if that device can’t do much more than the device they currently have.
Edit: I looked it up and I did see a site claiming well over 700 million iPhones so it is probably more users than I thought originally.
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I can't say how the transition will go, but the transition from PPC to Intel was fairly decent. Some bumps in the road, but overall the emulation that was supplied allowed PPC apps to run, until developers were able to roll out native apps.
I don't know if that will occur this time around, and I kind of doubt it. i think the demands of modern apps on intel will exceed the performance of what could be provided by ARM. I'm just providing an opinion as I don't have any facts on how well ARM handles multithreaded apps.
Oh no.
Flashback to old times when Mac was all about PowerPC – back when pro app developers gave up on the Mac because porting their x86 code to the relatively small Mac userbase was simply too much work. It was such a relief when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel and pro apps started to return.
#fear
Flashback to old times when Mac was all about PowerPC – back when pro app developers gave up on the Mac because porting their x86 code to the relatively small Mac userbase was simply too much work. It was such a relief when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel and pro apps started to return.
#fear
Judging from what I see on the iPad Pro the A**X chips should be fast enough for laptops. Maybe not on par with top of the line i9s, but probably beating the m-series chips as installed on Macbooks.
I guess its not an issue on processor speed, but rather one of software compatibility.
Would I buy an ARM-based Macbook? Yes, if otherwise done properly, the processor architecture doesn‘t really bother me.
Given Apple provides decent compiler/Xcode/SDK support, no big deal really
I guess its not an issue on processor speed, but rather one of software compatibility.
Would I buy an ARM-based Macbook? Yes, if otherwise done properly, the processor architecture doesn‘t really bother me.
Given Apple provides decent compiler/Xcode/SDK support, no big deal really
it will be a huge mistake, they will automatically lose everyone who need to run bootcamp.
Not only that, but they would also lose most customers that need to run virtualized environments via Parallels, Virtual Box, VMware Fusion, etc.
The reason many developers have chosen a mac is simply because it is the one device that can be used to target all viable platforms to develop for:
Web development
Mac development
iOS development
Android development
Windows development
Linux and BSD development
Without the ability to use Boot Camp or proper virtualization, most of the advantages are lost for serious developers. The Mac will no longer be a "one machine to code for it all" device. Which is the number one reason why developers chose an expensive Mac in the first place - unmatched flexibility. Take that away and there is no reason to purchase a mac. Any x86 device would provide more flexibility at that point. You would only chose a Mac if you developed specifically for macOS or iOS. That's a big oopsie right there.
Apple has an entire building full of chip engineers, many of whom who can do it. What makes you think they don’t already have such a high-TDP prototype beast running in some secret test lab? Or in one of their locked-down data centers, similar to Google before they announced their water-cooled TPUs? Or at least ready for tape-out as soon as management decides it’s safe to dump Intel.
I like the idea of cross compatibility but I'm afraid this will kill the few games I can enjoy on a Mac from Blizzard. Having the Intel procs meant high chance of games coming over that aren't the typical app store fare. What confuses me is how can the likes of Dell and HP put out new devices annually with new Intel chips but apple can't? Yes Intel isn't making leaps and bounds any more but new hardware is still being released.
I think you are right. The reason the last transition was embraced was because it made the Mac (sort of) standardized with the existing world of PCs. It made the transition easier, it made emulation easier, etc. Apple made the transition for performance and cost reasons, but Apple users accepted it for the standardization reasons. I sure Cook remembers the cost and performance benefits. What Cook never understood was the standardization issues and why it was accepted by users.
This transition makes Apple Macs non-standard again. So unless Windows, Linux, and Unix are released for the Apple ARM hardware, this blows and Cook has no idea. He thinks Apple is Apple and can do anything. Sure a few people will buy Apple Macs with ARM processors and never know the difference. But most of us pro users etc. will not. Of course, this probably why Apple has been pushing Pro users away in recent years.
Don't you still remember how painful it was to compete against Intel back then? Moving to Intel was a good move because IBM didn't improve chips fast enough. - At least from a designer perspective, it was great. If Apple can develop faster processors and GPU I am all for it. Right now its painful not to have NVIDA GPU for rendering power.
I’m curious to know what pro apps left the Mac and then came back strictly because of Apple switching to intel.
Not having an Nvidia GPU and CUDA has nothing to do with Intel, the x86 platform, or even nVidia though. It has everything to do with Apple's stubbornness. The problem for Apple is that Apple can't control CUDA. That is why there is no nVidia GPU in current Mac devices. AMD has open sourced the GCN platform. OpenCL and OpenGL is open sourced. Metal is not open sourced, and is fully controlled by Apple. CUDA is not open sourced, and is controlled by nVidia.
Apple likes to own and control all underlying technology in their devices. If they can't, then it needs to be open sourced so that they can still have insight into the technology. With CUDA they couldn't get either. And that is the reason there is no nVidia chips in Apple devices. Apple couldn't have the control they wanted.
The blame for the lack of CUDA and nVidia is ALL on Apple. And this won't change with adapting to ARM. If anything, it will make CUDA a much more distant dream for Apple devices. And you can forget about frameworks adapting to a new Apple specific and exclusive GPU architecture. It should be clear to see that, considering that the frameworks that utilize CUDA hasn't even been updated for the AMD GPU architecture for several years now.
Another approach would be to switch to Windows. That would guarantee that one avoids this drama that Apple brings up every few years.
I remember the transition from PowerPC to Intel. I think it required a rewrite of major programs to be compatible.
Will a transition to ARM require new software?
Will a transition to ARM require new software?
I need polish my posts, it seems.
I meant desktop devices in contrast to iOS devices and Intel compatibility in contrast to ARM compatibility (which, that ARM compatibility, I didn‘t see as something important, which was the only thing I wanted express
)