I certainly expect it to beat both x86 companies, Apple have the benefit of designing it themselves for only their platform and only their OS. Will be great paired with a future Apple made GPU
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Intel Restates Support for Apple During Transition to Apple Silicon
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I certainly expect it to beat both x86 companies, Apple have the benefit of designing it themselves for only their platform and only their OS. Will be great paired with a future Apple made GPU
Well, Tim said they will support Intel Macs for years to come. Hopefully he means at least 5-7.
I hope to be surprised, and very happy to see Apple race ahead in CPU's.
However, I need to keep my sensible hat on here, and wait and see how these things actually perform for real, and not just in an Apple promo piece.
Intel and AMD have been making HEAVYWEIGHT CPU's and in the case of AMD and Nvidia GPU's for many many years.
Apple has made some amazing low power chips thanks to licencing and modifying ARM chips.
And I had one of the very 1st ARM chips in my desktop machine decades ago.
An Acon Archimedes
Let's see how Apple's chips perform, price/performance when stacked up against Intel and AMD.
Really exiting times, but I'm also aware the hype and promise does not always totally work out when reality hits.
Let's see what machines get these Apple Chips & go from there
However, I need to keep my sensible hat on here, and wait and see how these things actually perform for real, and not just in an Apple promo piece.
Intel and AMD have been making HEAVYWEIGHT CPU's and in the case of AMD and Nvidia GPU's for many many years.
Apple has made some amazing low power chips thanks to licencing and modifying ARM chips.
And I had one of the very 1st ARM chips in my desktop machine decades ago.
An Acon Archimedes
Let's see how Apple's chips perform, price/performance when stacked up against Intel and AMD.
Really exiting times, but I'm also aware the hype and promise does not always totally work out when reality hits.
Let's see what machines get these Apple Chips & go from there
Most kinds of CPU arch's are RISC these days really, from ARM to Power ISA to MIPS.
x86 is one of the outliers as a mainstream CISC one in consumer systems today.
Most of them are history now like Motorola 68K in the original Macintosh or MOS 6502 in the Apple II.
Wow, do you work for Intel Marketing? Intel is only superior for games at this point and particularly the 1080P 144-300 fps crowd. Everywhere else from laptops to desktops, Intel is beat. An i9-10900K needs over 250 watts to beat beat a 140 watt Ryzen 9. Talk about poor power per performance. Intel's 10nm crapshow is probably one of the main reasons for Apple ditching them.
Yeah, we've been waiting for 5 years for Intel to finally ditch Skylake and its 14nm++++++++++ progeny
Sorry, I didn't get that kit as I was not into Apple dev then. Started in 2008 with first iPhone. Was it quite new when the kit was released? I guess now they don't have the silicone ready, but they said first computers would be available at the end of this year. They also said that this silicone was missing some subunits without further clarification.
For Apple, the adoption of their own silicon, is comparable to swapping bricks for armoured concrete to keep everyone trapped inside their beautiful walled garden.
And we will have to pay for this privilege. A lot...
And we will have to pay for this privilege. A lot...
MacRumors Buyers' Guide should say "don't buy" to everything in the Mac lineup.
You are mistaken about the capability of ARM architecture chips. In the server space there are now some very powerful ARM CPUs with 64 cores (check out https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/neoverse/neoverse-n1, and the AWS Graviton2 based on the ARM N1 - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/). These are not running weak cores either - there are plenty of benchmarks showing in many cases that these beat Xeon cores running at 2.5-3GHz, with significantly lower power.
Apple is clearly not going to just put their unaltered iPad and iPhone chips into the desktop. They will be run at a much greater TDP and have probably have more cores & GPU capability.
People need to get over the idea that ARM is just something for phones and tablets. Once you crank up the power they are now roughly equal to Intel, but run cooler and are probably cheaper. Certainly they win the "cost per compute" equation, which is why data centres and cloud service providers are interested in using them.
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Absolutely. Check out https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/neoverse/neoverse-n1 - (up to 8,192 core reference designs!) , and the AWS Graviton2 based on the ARM N1 - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/). These are not running weak cores either - there are plenty of benchmarks showing in many cases that these beat Xeon cores running at 2.5-3GHz, with significantly lower power.
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Even if Apple Intel-Mac were 10% of the PC market, a large part of Intel's x86 revenue (maybe most?) comes from x86 servers in data centres - including those run by Apple. I read elsewhere than maybe a move to ARM-Mac would cost Intel $1 billion per year of their > $75 billion revenue.
As you say, the danger is if other consumer manufacturers jump on ARM as well. If Apple blazes a successful trail with ARM using cheaper processors (which save them money), others will follow.
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The consumer side of apple (iphone, iwatch, ipad) with their casual usage of the computer (web, email, videos, etc) will probably see this as a great success.
If you are a power user, doing rendering, CAD work, music, video/film work, then I think this move is a step back. Wall garden and all, I am able to use my Mac side by side with a PC today, and its the fact that I can have a powerful, well engineered machine that I enjoy. I remember when Win10 started doing the auto-updates, UGH, I was so glad to have my host machine be MacOS.
Moving forward, its hard to imagine them completely dropping the creatives that use the Mac. It would be really sad as that was one of their market segments who helped the Mac come back when Steve jobs came back to Apple.
There are probably some tough changes coming up, I unfortunately see Apple only trying to focus on its KPIs and trying to drive sales up, and their stock price up at the expense of us, customers. I mean... look, they just released a $129 USB-c cable.
If you are a power user, doing rendering, CAD work, music, video/film work, then I think this move is a step back. Wall garden and all, I am able to use my Mac side by side with a PC today, and its the fact that I can have a powerful, well engineered machine that I enjoy. I remember when Win10 started doing the auto-updates, UGH, I was so glad to have my host machine be MacOS.
Moving forward, its hard to imagine them completely dropping the creatives that use the Mac. It would be really sad as that was one of their market segments who helped the Mac come back when Steve jobs came back to Apple.
There are probably some tough changes coming up, I unfortunately see Apple only trying to focus on its KPIs and trying to drive sales up, and their stock price up at the expense of us, customers. I mean... look, they just released a $129 USB-c cable.
Yes, but Graviton2 is a lot better
There is still a long way to go for ARM in the data center, but it does look interesting, and if it can be made to run as fast as x86 for a wide variety of workloads at a lower cost, we will see more of it. AWS is already offering quite attractive savings on their M6g instances. Some workloads run quite badly on ARM though, so there is definitely work to do before x86 is under serious threat.[automerge]1592953985[/automerge]
Actually, ARM chips can run at similar clock speeds to x86 - there is certainly not much difference in the core compute capability these days - at least if you run them at similar TDP. Apple will do their usual trick of balancing power with battery life in portable devices, but I think it unlikely that they will offer a product with noticeably worse compute performance. At a rough guess, they will market the ARM-macs as "20% faster, 50% more battery life!"
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Isn't the RISC architecture patents owned by ARM holdings in Britain and all other companies are licensing it from them including Apple?
You know this is quite ironically funny, I never thought of it this way. PowerPC was RISC but they couldn't make it any faster and cooler to put in iMacs and laptops, so they switched to the more powerful intel, then Apple went to make a phone and needed a smaller RISC chip which grew more powerful for iPads which grew so powerful that is going to replace 2021 Intel Chips...
The problem they had they created its own solution unconsciously and went completely full circle, I wonder what IBM is thinking🤣
Its even more ironic that Apple of them all is not a chip manufacturer in the first place, they are a software company but beat intel, AMD, ARM, and IBM #EvilInside🤣🤣
And really, isn't this what folks like us have been wanting for years now? By "folks like us" I mean those of us who come to sites like this one and other tech blogs, watch the Apple keynotes or any other company's conference, etc. We might see more OS cross-talk like never before if more companies follow suit and agree ARM is the way to go. I'm honestly far more excited about the next few years than I am concerned.
Multithreading is often subject to side-channel attacks because when one thread is replaced by another the state is not identical as it would have been if the first thread never was there. Even the amount of time it takes to swap out the old thread leaks information about that old thread. Using these attacks, people like Paul Kocher have successfully been able to read information in a secure thread by running a less privileged thread that should never have had access to that information. Multiple cores are not only more performant than multiple threads, but multiple threads are less secure.
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Apple has always considered itself a hardware company, not a software company.
Can't wait until Apple fully dumps Intel's chips. They're riddled with security vulnerabilities and Intel doesn't provide adequate support. No future microcode updates to fix CPUs in some Macs that were discontinued just 6 months ago is beyond ridiculous.
Yeah, but multiple cores *and* multiple threads are even more performant.
Some recent ARM CPUs also use SMT (e.g. Neoverse E1). The security risks can often be mitigated depending on the deployment scenario (e.g. avoid sharing cores between different tenants on cloud servers).That will depend on how many Intel-only features they depend on. If the apps can be recompiled with an ARM target then it's not necessarily a lot of work. I doubt it would be this simple for apps that have already been highly optimized to run on Intel chips though.
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I don't see why the move to ARM would necessarily affect creatives, unless their machines are choice are no longer available. ARM doesn't automatically imply "weak" - we've just been conditioned into thinking that because ARM chips are mostly known for use in mobile & embedded devices. There are 128 core ARM chips running in data centres that match the largest Intel Xeon processors for less cost. Although I would expect the Mac Pro to be last Mac to move to ARM, it's certainly technically possible even today.
Creatives and power-users will be just fine provided software vendors get on board.
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Apple does have datacenters, however, they mostly use AWS for iCloud. Their datacenters only hold important information I guess.
If they were smart they would do AMD EPYC - faster than Intel and less power.
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That's scary right there that Apple uses AWS. Amazon is another company that needs to go away.
Not at all, just providing accurate information rather than misinformation. I'd advise to look at a few real tests online (other than gaming) you'd see Intel is still performing better with four year old architecture.