Intel's Broadwell Chips for Most Macs Not Shipping Until Early to Mid 2015

[SlCKB0Y]

PPC is a beast compared to x86. And very well designed. It is just not mainstream hence is really expensive and used for specific tasks.
The reason why apple switched to intel was IBM&Sony CELL deal.

Have you ever had to deal with a 3rd party vendor in some project ? And this is cpu we are talking about. It's the core thing for their products. They can't just buy patents from Intel and start their own R&D that's now how it works. They can pressure intel as much as they want but in the end they are the ones NEEDING INTEL. The only reason to bring this **** inhouse is to switch to ARM or any other architecture. Apple has the money. They can afford it and we are living in the era when it is necessary for them to do so.

Hell and if you care about the performance...they can't afford yet another fiasco with an unfinished product. I assure you they will either release as powerful arm mac as current x86 solution or they fail.

You care about apps ? I assure you apple has the money and customer base to drag attention of developers. Soon enough (if we are talking about apple) you will not notice a difference.

This whole post is full of factual inaccuracies. The guy you were quoting was exactly right.

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No, the situation is totally different.

The PowerPC was falling dramatically behind general PC (x86) market. It could not compete in ether performance or power usage. IBM stopped caring about Apple and made the G5 fit for their servers and workstations, and couldn't be bothered with low-power SKUs. Apple had their backs to the wall and were forced to switch to justify their price premium.

Today Intel is the market leader. End of story. Nothing comes close in the performance and mainstream segment, and it's starting to compete with ARM in extreme low power with it's M/ULV chips.
Yes, there are some delays. Well, ****, Apple is still using the best there is, they're not falling behind anything. You're suggesting they would switch FROM the market leader to... what, a solution that doesn't even exist?


Also, why switch to ARM when they could be using Intel's new ultra low power chips that will crush ARM-anything while offering full backward compatibility?

Arm is a solution which doesn't existing to a problem that isn't real.

If Apple supposedly care so little about raw power and so much about power consumption that they should switch to arm, then why have we never seen an atom mac?

 

[joecool99]

INTEL should just cancel Broadwell at this point and jump right into Skylake mid 2015.
i have maxed out 2012 15" MBP w. 1TB SSD and will not update until next 14nm CPU arrives.

 

[Clubber]

You can't compare the two, they use different applications and OS, have different memory management systems, etc. Literally apples and oranges.

Sure you can. Geekbench performs x algorithms and it takes y seconds giving the x86 processor a score of z. It does the exact same with the ARM. I don't see how that is dramatically different as far as comparing computing power. Does geek bench use different algorithms for the ARM chip? That would be odd.

Besides, by switching to ARM and recompiling OSX and applications to run on it, what would we gain exactly?

I think they would stand to lose more than they gained, but that's not what I was inferring. What if the fastest computer you could buy was an ARM tablet/phone instead of an x86 laptop/desktop? What does the world look like if that happens?


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First Apple wants the yearly OS/hardware fashion show where perfectly good models of both items are replaced with (sometimes) slightly better ones.

Second there are a bunch of whining consumers who think that a complicated industry, whose science they don't even understand, somehow owes them new products every year. You'll find them slobbering over all the latest gotta have buzzwords line "Retina", "liquid metal", blah blah blah.

Is that you Michael Dell?

 

[iZac]

Apple wanted to use Windows as thing to lure Windows user into Mac world and hopefully they will eventually switch to OS X.

Will Apple allow this forever, probably they will drop Windows support when OS X reach to certainly market share when there is no need to lure Windows users. But it is not the time, at least not yet.

Well I certainly respect your point of view, I simply saw the history of Bootcamp more and a necessity to counter a tidal wave of hacks than a business strategy on behalf of Jobs. I mean he wasn't always right, even if he was (maybe?) against Windows support, he was also against App Store support too.

Anyway, yes we can at least both agree that Windows support won't last forever, just don't be surprised if it is sooner rather than later, they proved they are willing to go through a painful transition as the Intel switch itself proved.

Evolve or die may be their motto to developers

 

[Quu]

Sorry, your post doesn't make sense.

It makes sense, you even understand it you just want to pick an argument for some reason.

Not in the spirit of collaborative discussion.

 

[pragmatous]

I told you so

I was right I was right!

 

[eXan]

There are more things to update in a computer than its CPU. Time for Apple to get off their asses and start progressing their computers instead of relying on Intel to supply the driver for a model refresh.

And fix the damn mess that is iMac after 2012 already!

 

[Tubamajuba]

Or, if you want to be snarky about Intel, you could say that Intel processors are AMD64, just like AMD processors are...

Intel adopted AMDs 64-bit extensions for x86 after their IA-64/Itanium project lived up to its nickname of 'Itanic'...

Absolutely. AMD gets the credit for bringing us into the 64-bit era. Itanium never stood a chance at meeting Intel's original goal of having it eventually replace x86.

 

[captain kaos]

I wonder if it will force apple to go with their own chips?

 

[MisakixMikasa]

I wonder if it will force apple to go with their own chips?

Apple could technically do. They have designed some ARM based processor early years. However, Apple could only do ARM based processor as they cannot do x86 based processor.

This will go down the the debate of x86 vs ARM. I doubt Apple will make the transition that fast. They will only do when ARM is out perform than x86 or for pure battery life.

 

[SolarShane]

I can see Apple dropping Intel this decade. Hell, the Macs have gotten powerful enough to run Windows inside a VM. The A7 is more than enough powerful to do gaming and 3D work; and as it stands, it's able to blow dedicated gaming hardware out of the water.

The A8 is the one we have to look out for. With Metal and another set of various enhancements that Apple has up it's sleeve for software on the A8, this may be the first time that Apple chips overpower Intel chips. After all, the A7 is a desktop class chip when they introduced 64 bit support

 

[MisakixMikasa]

PPC is a beast compared to x86. And very well designed. It is just not mainstream hence is really expensive and used for specific tasks.
The reason why apple switched to intel was IBM&Sony CELL deal.

Have you ever had to deal with a 3rd party vendor in some project ? And this is cpu we are talking about. It's the core thing for their products. They can't just buy patents from Intel and start their own R&D that's now how it works. They can pressure intel as much as they want but in the end they are the ones NEEDING INTEL. The only reason to bring this **** inhouse is to switch to ARM or any other architecture. Apple has the money. They can afford it and we are living in the era when it is necessary for them to do so.

Hell and if you care about the performance...they can't afford yet another fiasco with an unfinished product. I assure you they will either release as powerful arm mac as current x86 solution or they fail.

You care about apps ? I assure you apple has the money and customer base to drag attention of developers. Soon enough (if we are talking about apple) you will not notice a difference.

Microsoft has no money and no customer base? Yet Windows RT failed dramatically and apps are still lacking...even OS X on x86 still has lot less app compare with Windows, some big developer aren't even port their app to OS X. How would you able to reassure users app situation will be better?

 

[asiga]

I agree it's time to go ARM. In the end, and considering both the latest performance gains and battery efficiency, it seems RISC was the good design. Intel had success with CISC just because of their marketing strategies, but it seems RISC is going to win the battle in the long term.

Please Apple, if the A8 can outperform current Intels, go ARM. And do it now.

 

[louiek]

If we just get a minor cpu bump and a graphics card upgrade to the rMBP, what cards are we most likely to see replace the current NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and would these show any noticeable improvement in gaming performance? Thanks.

 

[petsounds]

No, the situation is totally different.

The PowerPC was falling dramatically behind general PC (x86) market. It could not compete in ether performance or power usage. IBM stopped caring about Apple and made the G5 fit for their servers and workstations, and couldn't be bothered with low-power SKUs. Apple had their backs to the wall and were forced to switch to justify their price premium.
?

Eh, what? It's not that different at all. Intel's performance is flatlining (for various reasons, including AMD's lack of competitive offerings). They've also lagged on power usage, which is something Apple is very serious about. Heck, Apple developed their own chips in part because of this. Apple would rather control as much of the product as possible, and I think this is what they're working towards.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Please Apple, if the A8 can outperform current Intels, go ARM. And do it now.

What do you even mean "if"? I can tell you right now it won't, it won't even be close.

 

[Tech198]

*minor* boost ?

Oh good, im safe, since i just got my Macbook Pro Retina. why the hell would i wanna replace it this early ?

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Eh, what? It's not that different at all. Intel's performance is flatlining (for various reasons, including AMD's lack of competitive offerings). They've also lagged on power usage, which is something Apple is very serious about.

Eh, What? Its completely different.

In terms of raw power, the current Apple ARMs would struggle to beat Intel's entry level Atoms. Every Intel processor above that will absolutely crush A7..forget about Intel desktop or Xeon....

When Apple switched to Intel, Intel was much faster with enough left over to emulate PPC AND was more powerful efficient.

 

[Burger Thing]

What really bites is that it looks like we'll never see another new 17" MacBook Pro again.

Sadly I was thinking the same. I'm going to hold on onto my refurbished 2011/12 17", which replaced my 2009 17" MBP. Not interested in current offerings.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

If they had the resources before why not again, now that they are in a totally different place than 2005's "Chip-Swtitch"?

They can pair-up with one of those to combine designs of an integrated chip THEN stand to gain billions as a new chip provider!”

During the PowerPC days they bough in the chips, they didn't actually design the things. Their input on the design was along the lines of "We want it to do this, this and this" and the chipmakers (mainly Motorola and IBM) did what they asked. The reason why this worked was because chips hadn't gotten that complex yet, but when chips got more and more complex Motorola had to drop out and eventually IBM lost interest in providing Apple with chips that could compete with Intel's offerings so Apple had no choice but to go knocking on Intel's door. IBM was able to keep their partnership going for as long as it did by scaling down a mainframe design, however at the cost that it couldn't be put into laptops (Motorola tried making a mobile G5 for Apple, but had to admit they couldn't pull it off).

The reason why Apple is able to make their own chips in the mobile sector and why ARM based mobile solutions in general are so competitive in that market is becaue Intel pretty much ignored it for years because it wasn't as lucrative as the market for bigger and more powerful chips. Workload wise a modern laptop, desktop or server processor is a quantum leap ahead of mobile chips.

The last thing Apple wants to do is reveal it's "secret sauce" to a third party like Qualcomm, Nvidia, MediaTEK or, god forbid, Samsung. IBM and AMD are the only players out there with experience in non-mobile chips, but IBM isn't intested in consumer chips anymore (rumor says they're considering dropping out of the hardware game completely) and AMD is an x86 company. Not only that, nether company actually has the resources to compete with the behemoth called Intel. AMD has pretty much dropped out of the performance market and is now committed to lower design workload low price and cost solutions called APU's.

So in short it all really comes down to staff and money, which is why Intel and AMD are the only makers of chips that are "above" mobile, but "below" mainframe for almost a decade and why Intel has such an advantage over AMD.

 

[sprezz]

Sadly I was thinking the same. I'm going to hold on onto my refurbished 2011/12 17", which replaced my 2009 17" MBP. Not interested in current offerings.

still running my 2009 17 inch mbp... still runs quite nicely, but i've been considering either getting a proper SSD (already upgraded to 1TB spinning) or just get an entirely new macbook. not sure which one yet. personally, i can live with any CPU offering today. the C2D 3Ghz i have now is already slow as hell compared to what's going on in the CPU market.

preferably i'd go for a 15 inch retina macbook air, with a long lasting battery.

should be cheaper than the rMBP, but has the screen real-estate i need to code and design.

one can dream right?

 

[Steve121178]

Intel makes it seem like Broadwell will launch simultaneously with Skylake Q2 2015.
RIP Broadwell pre-release

Skylake is delayed from it's original 2015 release date. Now Q1 2016.

 

[petsounds]

Eh, What? Its completely different.

In terms of raw power, the current Apple ARMs would struggle to beat Intel's entry level Atoms. Every Intel processor above that will absolutely crush A7..forget about Intel desktop or Xeon....

I'm not sure what you're responding to. I never suggested current Apple chips are ready to be put in Macs. But the winds are blowing that direction. Within a couple years, I think we'll see one in the Macbook Air. Longer for the "pro" Macs.

 

[Steve121178]

The reason why apple switched to intel was IBM&Sony CELL deal.

No, this is Apple we are talking about. It was primarily because of cost & the fact that Intel ship the best processors on the planet for a range of mainstream devices such as desktop computers, workstation class machines & portable computers

The IBM/Toshiba/Sony alliance was a waste of time and billions of dollars. The Cell CPU was a load of crap & developers hated it.

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INTEL should just cancel Broadwell at this point and jump right into Skylake mid 2015.
i have maxed out 2012 15" MBP w. 1TB SSD and will not update until next 14nm CPU arrives.

You don't cancel something that has already cost you tens of billions of dollars in development.

Besides, I firmly believe you buy a new machine as and when you need it. The only time it's worth waiting is when a new generation of processors is due imminently and you don't mind waiting upto 4-8 weeks. You also have to remember that Apple typically waits until 3 months after a CPU is released before they make new Macs available. The only exception this time around could be in Q4 of this year when they announce a new MBA with a Y series Broadwell CPU (now branded Intel Core M).

 

[randian]

You don't cancel something that has already cost you tens of billions of dollars in development.

Fallacy of sunk costs. The real cost of Broadwell is the 14nm process. If that's working there's no reason not to skip Broadwell and get your schedule back on track by going directly to Skylake. Having a short Broadwell lifecycle and a split Broadwell/Skylake lineup is bizarre and likely a dud sales-wise, not to mention expensive.